In this powerful, timely study Ronald Niezen examines the processes by which cultural concepts are conceived and collective rights are defended in international law. Niezen argues that cultivating support on behalf of those experiencing human rights violations often calls for strategic representations of injustice and suffering to distant audiences. The positive impulse behind public responses to political abuse can be found in the satisfaction of justice done. But the fact that oppressed peoples and their supporters from around the world are competing for public attention is actually a profound source of global difference, stemming from differential capacities to appeal to a remote, unknown public. Niezen's discussion of the impact of public opinion on law provides fresh insights into the importance of legally-constructed identity and the changing pathways through which it is being shaped – crucial issues for all those with an interest in anthropology, politics and human rights law.
Author(s): Ronald Niezen
Series: New Departures in Anthropology
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 270
City: Cambridge
Cover
Half-title
Series-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
One: The imagined order
The ethnography of the unknowable
Flux and boundary
Soft power and publics
Conceptual diplomacy
The personification of the state
Two: The power of persons unknown
The golden record
Tarde’s sociology of imitation
The persona of mass publics
Witnessing and new media
Invisibility
Three: Cultural lobbying
Cultural justice
Northern exposure
Southern exposure
African appeal
Four: The invention of indigenous peoples
Introduction
Self-determination and self-definition
The invention of indigenism
The cultural contradictions of indigenism
Five: Civilizing a divided world
Civilization in review
Culture according to UNESCO
The UN’s civilizing mission
Reconceiving civilization
Civilizational utopianism
Ethnographic enchantment
Contradictions of conceptual diplomacy
Six: Reconciliation
The human rights confessional
The violence of assimilation
A change of spirit
Modes of repentance and of suffering
Revolt of the accused
The social construction of penitence
Seven: Juridification
Legal intensification and substitution
The virtues of the oppressed
Institutional essentialism
Juridification from below
Re-enchantment
References
Legal references
International instruments
National statutes and agreements
Canada
Spain
Index
