 So I have a question for you. Can you respect human rights and culture at the same time? What do you think about that? Well, in this lesson, we're going to be discussing this debate because it's one that is quite important in the human rights conversation. But first, I think we should start by taking a look at what culture is. And I'm going to write it on this little diagram here in opposition to our genes. Our genes being the genetic material that make us physically who we are. So they compose a big important part of our biology. So if you were to put your genes in opposition to culture, I think you get a pretty good idea of what culture is. If you look, your genes determine things like your natural skin color, for example, like that. Something like that, so your natural skin color, maybe your eye color. It might affect things too, like the shape of your body or your health. Things like that, though not completely just your health. There are some very complicated stuff going on there. But in a sense, your genes are not completely fixed. Science is coming up with new stuff about this all the time. But they are generally considered to be quite fixed. It's something that's quite unchangeable and it has to do with the individual in many ways. Culture, however, is just about everything else. So you can think about things like language. You might want to think about things like the clothes that you wear. Maybe something like this word that a lot of people use these days, your world view. So the way that you see the world, the way you understand the world. Things like your habits can be culture, although some people have very individual habits like me having a messy room. You have things like art, maybe your ethics and values, maybe your religion. These things are all things that belong to our culture. Not just as individuals but as groups as well. You also have things like relationships. And where we see culture come out the most, where we see it especially in groups, is in the way that we experience life events. We all at certain moments in our lives are born, we all die, many of us marry, we all go through puberty. And in these moments culture is particularly strong. It has a lot to say about how we experience those things. And in that sense culture, especially at these moments of life events and in all these other areas, give us our sense of identity. So it's very personal. Culture is something that we're very connected to. But one thing is if you look at culture from very far away, if you're a step back from your own life and look at maybe a foreign culture or a culture on another planet, maybe we go far away from the earth and look down at some other group, we can actually see that usually culture is not fixed. So culture is often a blend. So you'll see other cultures mixing and touching each other and changing each other, affecting each other. And you'll also see culture changing over time. And right now in the moment that we live in, culture is changing very quickly in some places, which many people are saying it's not a good thing, other people say it's a great thing. And it's all stuff that comes up in this conversation about human rights and culture. As a quick definition, so to sum up all of these definitions that we came up with over here, all of these examples really, I'm going to quote an anthropologist named Edward B. Tyler who said, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any capability and habits acquired by man as a member of society. And there even in the last few words you can see a cultural habit of his which was referring to men and not people, which is something that today people do much more than they did before. So you want to remember that culture in many ways and like he just mentioned actually also has a lot to do with law, which is something that we've been talking about in this course a lot, and actually makes a really good transition into the next idea that involves human rights and culture. And this important idea is actually more about a debate. In that debate people are asking are human rights universal or are they relative? What do we mean by that? Well, there is a group of people out there who say that human rights apply to everyone everywhere. Everyone and everywhere. So we talk about this with things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There's another group of people and they're also spread out and I would maybe say a smaller group of people who say that these things are relative. That human rights happen in bubbles if you want to think of it that way. That for example the people who are saying for example that human rights are universal live in maybe a big bubble and they have a certain set of human rights but that there are other cultures and other ways of seeing the world that allow for those people to have a different definition of human rights and that they should be allowed their own definition of what a human right is. In reality however most people I would say fall on the line somewhere between these two views. Many of them over here further to the left, closer to the universal view. This is definitely for example where you'll find a lot of the human rights community, people who work in campaigns and advocacy for human rights. And on the other side a lot of times you will find things like governments of different countries who are trying to express their will or trying to express their identity in relation to some sort of maybe something where the human rights community is saying you're doing this wrong and this government or this country or this society says no or not because human rights are relative so we'll pull up an example of that in a second but generally topics that we're talking about these are usually talked about as topics not as a bigger broader discussion in the way that we're talking about it. A lot of times people talk about slavery, they talk about genital cutting so this is a practice that's also quite common in some parts of the world and they talk about things like child labor. Another discussion like maybe a good example of what we're talking about might be something like women driving cars in certain maybe Muslim countries for example. We can pull that as an example. So women and driving. If you were to look from an international perspective the right to mobility or the right to get around and go places that you need to go is seen as something that's valuable. And in certain and in a very small handful of Muslim countries women are not allowed to drive. This is not like a really hot debate so that's kind of why I'm pulling it as an example. And if you were to go to those places and talk to people in those places particularly members of the government or sort of the ruling structures might say well that's just our culture, we live in this bubble, women aren't allowed to drive in this bubble they can drive in other bubbles but not in our bubble. And members of the outside community might say well no but human rights are universal so there is just one big massive bubble and these little bubbles don't count. We all have one big bubble and all these human rights like the right to mobility for women to drive they apply there as well. So these are the kinds of discussions that are being had. A lot of times this comes along with a really great deal of tension between this sort of especially in the cases of governments and of societies and bigger global organizations because the history behind this is actually kind of a hard one. If you think about it you might have a country here, maybe a country that falls into this category who is further closer to this relative side who has been colonized and maybe an organization from a former colonizer so maybe people who used to boss these people in this country around are coming in and again saying well you're doing it wrong you should do it this way. And both sides have an argument. These guys over here on the left might be right in some ways and these guys on the right might be right as well. And this is the moment in which we then have to ask ourselves some hard questions and think about what are we really talking about? Are we talking about rights? Are we talking about history? Are we talking about certain conflicts that we've had in the past? What is the discussion really about? That's something that you should be thinking about as you go along. So when we're having this discussion we want to remember that no culture is perfect. That when we're having these discussions people have agendas, people have ideas on both sides and then we want to remember that we're talking about the topic at hand that we're talking about slavery or we're talking about genital cutting that we're talking about child labor or maybe we're talking about the right to drive a car. In any of these cases we want to try to take a look at the history, understand it but also understand it in context and think about our space in time where we're at and where we want our global community and our local community to go in the long run. So this is all very important. I'm going to let you walk away with that thought in mind maybe thinking about whether you've seen any examples of this debate in your own community. Alright, so that was your lesson. We're going to move on to some very similar stuff in our next lesson.