Human Rights and the Right to Culture in China

As anthropologists we are often preoccupied with our own circumscribed studies of local communities. Only during World War II did we embrace the global dimensions and importance of cultural differences. Many Western anthropologists who have recently, and as a matter of conscience, become concerned with globalization have abandoned the concept of culture as an organizing principle, perhaps in part because they confuse cultural relativism with moral relativism, and perhaps because it is fashionable to denounce their forebears. As professionals I think we must deal with the cultural dimensions of a problem first before making moral judgements. I remain convinced that the concept of culture is a useful tool for understanding and shaping macro-level political understanding and dialogue, in somewhat the same way as Ruth Benedict and others demonstrated more than half a century ago. American policy failures in the international arena, of which the war in Afghanistan is one result, are related to arrogance (ethnocentrism) which breeds ignorance of other cultures and a lack of comparative perspective on American culture as well. Human rights is one issue where the United States is blindly pushing its own agenda to its own detriment

Conscience · Cultural relativism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethnocentrism · Globalization · Human rights · Ignorance · Political science · Politics · Relativism · Sociology · Anthropology · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Chinese history and philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies