The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Abstract

Those arguing against human rights have often been on the wrong side of history. While there are excellent critiques of human rights from many directions, it is often those who seek to oppress or justify an imbalanced status quo who push back against human rights most firmly. This chapter explores how anthropology came to be on the wrong side of this divide, taking an anti-human rights stand for over four decades. Cultural relativism was a term derived from Franz Boas rather than a term coined by him. And as he used varied definitions of culture throughout his career and did not formulate a definition of culture for publication until 1930. In 1997 Richard Wilson’s Human Rights: Culture and Context finally moved us beyond endless debates over universalism versus cultural relativism. Wilson’s volume demonstrated through ethnographic examples how rights had become embedded in cultural practices around the world and how anthropology could shed light on these variations.

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