 Most of us will have encountered, at some point, arguments in media and popular culture that blame the oppression of women around the world on customary practices, tradition, or culture. Common examples are the allegedly socially enforced custom of Muslim women wearing the hijab, or the practice of female genital mutilation. In these examples, the press seemed very quick to blame culture. So, does culture stand in the way of women's rights? Is a universalist belief in individual rights in opposition to the respect for cultural difference? And what have anthropologists had to say on this matter? Custom is seen as an obstacle to the achievement of women's freedom and agency often. But these are values that the anthropologist Leela Abu-Lugod has pointed out are very important within Western feminist thinking, but might not necessarily be values that are prioritized for women around the world. When it comes to female genital mutilation, Sally Engel-Merry, whose work I've added to the further reading for this week, argues that while FGM has become the poster child of harmful traditional practices, it is in fact a quintessential example of a practice justified by custom and culture that is subsequently redefined as an act of violence and a breach of women's human rights. So in this vision, culture seems to stand as a barrier to human rights. Culture is the problem, modernity is the answer. What Sally Engel-Merry questions is not that FGM isn't potentially painful or harmful for women's bodies, but rather she queries the seemingly excessive attention given to this particular practice over many other harmful processes in the world that negatively affect women. What this overemphasis points to, she suggests, is a tendency to culturalize problems. In other words, it's easier to blame culture for problems rather than to understand how our world's interconnected political and economic systems might be contributing to gender inequality. In anthropology, we can trace these debates back to 1948, the year in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on the 10th of December. This post-war document was a response partly to the horrors of war and the atrocities committed, particularly by Nazi Germany, that were becoming fully apparent at this time. This document declared that human rights were inherent, inalienable and universal. They applied to every human being in every part of the world. However, during the drafting of the document, it came under attack by the American Anthropological Association, and this is the main professional body of anthropologists in the United States, an organization which still exists today. The criticism, which was written by anthropologists linked to the Boasian School of Anthropology, published a scathing attack. In it, they criticized the document for deep-seated hypocrisy. How could the West lead the way as a moral arbiter of human rights when the world was now only emerging from its project of colonialism? Moreover, they argued that since the moral fabric of life could not be detached from cultural context, it made little sense to try to pin down trans-cultural values and principles. The declaration represented a lack of respect for cultural difference. So in the statement, these anthropologists go further still by implying that the declaration represents a continuation of colonialism itself because it subordinates non-European values, ascribing cultural inferiority to people who hold alternative views or values. Therefore, implicitly reintroducing hierarchies that have long justified the economic exploitation of millions of people around the world. Now, after this criticism was published, the American Anthropological Association in turn received a lot of criticism. It was accused of holding outrageous views of being unhelpful, of being an embarrassment to attempts at international collaboration and understanding. Its critics accused it of holding a position that would morally condone any act without discretion. So what you might notice here is a tension between two concepts that we identified as important last week, between a universalist vision of humanity and a culturally relativist position that insists on the incommensurability of different cultures. So this week we'll be examining the Boasian School of American Anthropology that advocated cultural relativism, we'll be looking at their theories in more detail and we'll be asking what might be the limitations also of a culturally relativist position. Anyone who posits a universal mode of thought has to in a way ignore that any such mode of thought has arisen in a particular moment in time and in a particular place. Universalists have a great deal of problems trying to reckon with this and its consequences. On the other hand, the relativists are also subject to a potentially damning critique. That is that any relativist position undermines the possibility of its own proof. In other words, by arguing that all truths and ways of seeing the world are not only relative but also questionable, this undermines its own assertions that truths are relative. In this sense, relativism seems to shoot itself in the foot, in a sense. Other possible considerations might be, do we really want to emphasize the incommensurability of cultures in a world that's so divided up into nation states? And we might also want to consider the extent to which the concept of culture might give the impression of a degree of boundedness of entities that is too rigid. Perhaps the cultural groups that anthropologists long saw as fairly isolated were in contact for much longer than they assumed. So this might be another problem emerging from the early cultural relativist analysis. So these are some of the ideas at the root of the discussions we'll be having this week and in class you'll consider further debates I've outlined here and the problems with the Boasian's idea of cultural relativism.