TY - JOUR
T1 - The contingency of 'rights'
T2 - Locating a global discourse in Aboriginal Central Australia
AU - Holcombe, Sarah
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Australian Anthropological Society.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self-determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo-imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been 'one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century'. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm-setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co-option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated.
AB - The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self-determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo-imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been 'one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century'. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm-setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co-option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84948146384&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/taja.12100
DO - 10.1111/taja.12100
M3 - Article
SN - 1035-8811
VL - 26
SP - 211
EP - 232
JO - The Australian Journal of Anthropology
JF - The Australian Journal of Anthropology
IS - 2
ER -