Lecture 10

Question 1

what were ethnographer’s concerns at the beginning pf the foundation of human rights

Answer 1

anthropologists had concerns at the beginning about the foundation of human rights; they were concerned about what actually happened to human variety when you emphasize the rights of individuals and neglect the rights of the community that they belong… concerned with concept of culture.
Below emphasises the concern that human rights were very much individual rights to protect them from the harms and crimes of the state, bu putting the emphasis on the individual, anthropologists at the time, were concerned about the collectivist to which people belong would not be protected.
This would allow for the unsupported of languages and community that people are in

very westernized sense of rights that might be imposed and culture differences would not be taken into account

Question 2

what are the Two kinds of human rights ethnography

Answer 2

Institutional ethnography

Universals (like human rights) in local practice

Question 3

what is involved with Institutional ethnography

Answer 3

Emphasis on experts in their own milieu
Familiarity (bureaucracy) and “otherness” (knowledge practices) “Studying up,” (Nader). Emphasis on influential actors

basically; involves extending the idea of the field site from the local setting that is conceived as from anthropology and going to places like offices, and buildings, etc. Th people they study often share the same kind of background as the anthropologists themselves (professionals). Looking at people who occupy a bureaucracy. Where would you go? Where human rights are conceived, such as banks and offices, etc.

Question 4

what is involved in Universals (like human rights) in local practice

Answer 4

Emphasis on experts as interveners and mediators, “vernacularization” (Sally Merry).
Disjuncture between expert knowledge and local knowledge (failures of translation in Englund’s terms).
Unequal relationships of power, access to information

basically; relationship between people who communicate human rights (in NGOs, banks, etc) and the people who are the “benefitiaries” of those initiatives; we look at the way human rights are (mis)communicated and the strategies that people use. What is the discourse of power that comes with social normal. How do people who are “beneficiaries” of social norms deal with it?

Question 5

what are the Two kinds of ethical “positioning”

Answer 5

Analytical” ethnography

Engaged” or “activist” ethnography

Question 6

what is Analytical ethnography

Answer 6

Emphasis on what human rights “does” in practice. How it works. What it produces

Question 7

what is Engaged” or “activist” ethnography

Answer 7

Emphasis on personal involvement in justice causes.
And/or
Emphasis on improving legal intervention, making the law more effective.

Question 8

what is the point of ethical positioning

Answer 8

plus the role that the ethnographer is put in/decides to play in order to gain access to the field. Are you taking a step back and looking in on things as they happen, or are you an activist and how do you present the people with or whom you are working for

Question 9

how was the oath african apartheid truth and reconciliation commission a field site

Answer 9

idea of truth and reconciliation commission being the foundation for a new sort of state hood— not just the stories of people who were part or and victimized by the aprartheid regime, but it is the effort of the reconciliation commission to improve the lives and such as people. This reconciliation commission is a field site

Increasingly, human rights talk [has become] detached from its strictly legal foundations and become a generalized moral and political discourse to speak about power relations between individuals, social groups and states (xv).
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-2001) was the archetypal transitional statutory body created to promote a ‘culture of human rights’ in South Africa . . . [It] was geared not only towards building a state of right, but also towards using human rights talk to construct a new national identity (13).

Question 10

who is associated with vernacularization

Answer 10

Sally Engle Merry

Question 11

what is vernacularization

Answer 11

she has developed some of the tools we have for looking at what we find when we 0 in on the space between the universals and the local
vernacularization is done by the people in the middle, they represent the agency that is bragging human rights or bank loans, they implement human rights in racal settings
it involves the people who translates the stuff of human rights into action
social justice advocacy

Question 12

give the slideshow explanation of vernacularization

Answer 12

As ideas from transnational sources travel to small communities, they are typically vernacularized, or adapted to local institutions and meanings (38).
A key dimension of the process of vernacularization is the people in the middle: those who translate the discourses and practices from the arena of international law and legal institutions to specific situations of suffering and violation. Intermediaries or translators work at various levels to negotiate between local, regional, national, and global systems of meaning. Translators refashion global rights agendas for local contexts and reframe local grievances in terms of global human rights principles and activities. However, the source of global ideas and institutions is usually an- other locality that has developed an idea or practice that is translated into a form that circulates globally and is then transplanted into another locality. This work is done by ac- tors who move between the discourses of the localities they work with, taking ideas from one place and redefining them or adapting them to another. Multiple translators connect transnationally circulating discourses and particular social contexts (39)

Question 13

what is Harri Englund’s view on ethnography

Answer 13

he takes the most skeptical view people have on ethnography
his argument; there are problems int he translation that is happening, people are using different languages than the people who are intended to be the “beneficiaries”

Human rights discourse—even when asserting all individuals as equals—can be deprived of its democratizing potential and made to serve particular interests in society. The problem, patently, is intrinsic not to particular words themselves but to translation as a cultural and political process, its own situational characteristics obscured by human rights activists’ commitment to abstraction and universalism

Question 14

what does Harri Englund say about the way people approach power and beneficiaries

Answer 14

the way power becomes manifested, the way people approach the “beneficiaries” with a certain authority
the knowledge is not finding its way through the human rights experts to the people who are the beneficiaries
he sees the human rights discourse as disempowering

Question 15

who is the The Chikondi case associated with

Answer 15

Harri Englund

Question 16

what is the Chikondi case

Answer 16

workers exploited despite the human rights stuff
and so there is this collision between supposed beneficiaries (Chikondi) and the boss
doesnt help the labour relations, it emphasizes differences

The Chikondi case:
An apparent collusion between a legal officer and Patel was not based on premeditated conspiracy. It did, however, reveal the thin line that existed between the two kinds of contempt for victimhood that Chikondi’s case indicated. Legal officers held their clients in contempt to the extent that they, the officers, regarded their knowledge as exclusively their own. Chikondi’s tribulations disclosed, in turn, a form of labor relations in which the worker was treated as something less than human . . . The ‘less privileged’ . . . appeared as a distinct species altogether (155)

Question 17

what is activist anthropology

Answer 17

on the other hand, there are others engaged in human rights and the advocacy who are working and having impacts on behalf of the marginalized
these people shed light on human rights abuses
lack of response that is part of the way that the medical communities not responding in adequate ways to people in the margines,

Question 18

what does Paul Farmer say about human rights in health

Answer 18

A disease that shortens life spans but does not affect economic growth would not merit attention in the development paradigm; non-contagious diseases matter less in the public goods paradigm. Yet remedying all diseases that afflict human kind is the chief goal of global health (124).

basically; this is the point he is making
making a case through his ethnography (activist ethnography) to put pressure on states and governments to response to emergency and human rights abuses

Question 19

Some new human rights concerns arising from algorithms and machine learning such as what

Answer 19

1. Election influence.
2. Surveillance technologies and the interpretation of data.
3. Automated employer/employee relations.
4. Access to health insurance based on information in Facebook newsfeeds.
5. Racial, ethnic, gender (etc.) bias based on automated systems. Etc., etc. . . .