In-Depth Notes on Anthropology, Culture, and Human Rights Reporting

"Clifford Geertz (1983:74) 'skeletonization' and 'sterilization' processes" (Wilson, )

whaterver it is that the law is after is not the whole story (1983:173)

"Documentary realism preference for a 'elusive' or a 'distance' realism where reality is presented through the filter of memory" (Wilson, )

"This 'just give us the facts' approach inherently implies an excising of personal biographies, the filter of memory, the performative dimensions of the speech act" (Wilson, )

"The importance of this distinction lies in how it separates the individual from the social, facts from interpretations, all in an effort to preserve an unassailable and legalistic regime of truth" (Wilson, )

"Evacuating the author serves not only as a protective device, but also creates an aura of objectivity and neutrality by wiping the stain of subjectivity off the surface of the text" (Wilson, )

"Similarly, the reliability of human rights reports rests not upon a reflexive mode of emplotment, but in the trustworthiness of the genre itself, and the organisations which produce it" (Wilson, )

"Subjectivity belongs only to victims, whereas the organisations hosting them preserve their objectivity" (Wilson, )

"Wilson argues that this objectivity and appearance to legalism, inherently, displaces, ethics and values from what is considered an ethical endeavor, human rights reporting" (Wilson, )

"Human rights, researchers, piece together, contradictory information on a pre-existing criteria about what kind of murder victim, the manner of the murder is likely to constitute a human rights violation" (Wilson, )

"Human rights researchers are pre-biased by their own framework, approve existing criteria of what sides of a murder victim, and what constitutes that she look like violation, they seek to impose, meaning on the multitudes of contradictory reports and testimonies into a way that can be easily processed by readers around the world" (Wilson, )

"The existence of governmental killings has been so doubted that Amnesty has a criteria for what consists as a traditional victim in a way that selects others and filters out others into this category of 'victim'" (Wilson, )

"In so doing, the discourse of human rights constructs its subjects as much as it reacts to events, since these criteria promote a selective process which screens out certain cases and homes in on others. In particular human rights texts construct the category of 'victim', and many Amnesty International country reports list violations against trade unionists, students, refugees or political activists under the umbrella heading of 'The Victims'" (Wilson, )

"Traditionally, each case is only spoken about in human rights context, and how they speak for the cause—if there is any detailed information about that specific subject, it is traditionally reported in a dry objective manner like a police report provoking that documentary style, but in words" (Wilson, )

"Well, governments may be the primary recipicent of these legal reports. They are not the sole recipient in a wide range of reporting styles is both defensible and necessary" (Wilson, )

"Wilson uses fieldwork in Guatemala Social researcher more likely to contextualize the event rather than to codify it like a human rights researcher" (Wilson)

This is not done, maliciously, to slight the victims or evade the truth. But the texture of the event is lost in the human rights reports"

"A human rights violation must be political. It must be between citizen to state rather than the common crime of citizen to citizen" (Wilson, )

"'Common crime'—this is often blurred. Human rights organizations know that political killings are often made to look like homicide... this has even pierced the country's knowledge in Guatemala, in which political killings are made to look like common crime with stabbing, poison, and common crime can often be concealed as political shots to the back of the head. Manipulating the expectation of truth" (Wilson, )

"The victim, being traditionally, poor uneducated, weak, desperate against the stable, powerful government" (Wilson, )

"Poor uneducated defenseless in need" (Wilson, )

"Consider Rossi who failed to fit into this and therefore was not picked up by Amnesty" (Wilson, )

"Meanings exist in a force field of other meanings. You could not talk about the meaning of an action without connecting it to a narrative (including other actions) if you want to interpret its meaning" (Inglis, )

"This process of delimiting narratives began early on in human rights reporting, as one worker from a major international organisation told me" (Wilson, )

"Human rights accounts often extract 'victims' from their family and class background" (Wilson, )

"Amnesty International is arguably the organisation which puts the greatest emphasis on the limited documentation of individual cases. Other organisations, such as the US-based Watch Committees, offer much more analysis of ongoing conditions" (Wilson, )

"Local words are seldom deployed, nor are interpretations of translated words particularly in evidence. For example, 'La violencia' is the term often used by locals to refer to political violence in Guatemala. Yet like the term 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland, it has a set of political meanings which human rights reports do not delve into or even allude to" (Wilson, )

"I ask is this not simply another way to be silenced, perhaps even more nefarious under the guise of help" (Wilson, )

"How they derive their truth is lost in the 'seamless web of text'" (Wilson, )

"Violence, like any other social process, is expressed and interpreted according to sets of metaphors about the nature of power, gender relations and human bodies. This communicative dimension means that violence is never 'meaningless'" (Wilson, )

"First, they can depoliticise human rights violations by drawing attention away from structural processes of class or ethnic power, and reduce violations to a set of technical problems concerning the functioning of the legal system. Second, the gory semiology of human rights abuses, and particularly torture and mutilation, remain incomprehensible except as irrational outbursts devoid of meaning. It is as if the maxim 'To understand is to forgive' has been taken too literally. By under-emphasising the structural and transnational dimensions of violence, human rights reports render such acts universal" (Wilson, )

"The data obtained by Amnesty International from human rights workers and others is necessarily fragmented, incomplete and variable. Sounds like the warnings at the end of medication commercials rather than a self-conscious awareness that knowledge emerges from creative insight, the interpretation of partial connections and in the act of representation itself" (Wilson, )

"Amnesty International or Americas Watch are reliable institutions. The validity of the report rests upon reputation and rhetoric, and the reader is forced to choose between either believing or disbelieving. When presented with a seamless style of representation, healthy scepticism has no place to take hold" (Wilson, )

"Although I did not see the body, I heard the shots, saw the milling crowd, and heard the immediate description of an ashen-faced bystander. The rhetorical power of these statements is both more forceful and more directly questionable than the Olympian view-from-nowhere which characterises human rights report" (Wilson, )

"Where every 'fact' is an act of interpretation resulting from the critical judgement of a documentor about what constitutes valuable evidence" (Wilson, )

"Subjectivity and information not immediately relevant to the prosecution of the individual case are dismissed" (Wilson, )

"As legal fact based upon universal criteria of truth in the present global context carries much greater rhetorical power than interpretations made by contextualised individuals relying on a creative subjectivity" (Wilson, )

"Since their only resource is the symbolic capital created by the ability to generate certain types of information, then it matters a great deal how that information is constructed" (Wilson, )

"The exalting of a legal/technical rationality above history and experience is ironically self-defeating, since despite its dedication to ethical ends, its method itself is denuded of ethics, having displaced value distinctions from its own operation" (Wilson, )

"By embracing a technocratic language, human rights reporting lays itself open to the same critique as could be made of the devalued, dehumanised language of abusive forms of governance. Desubjectification, after all, is the chosen modus operandi of the torturer, and it hardly seems appropriate to employ a desubjectified narrative in order to represent abusive acts" (Wilson, )

Let me know if you'd like these compiled into a document or table.

Understanding Human Rights Reports

• Human rights reporting genre is selective, reflecting not just the events but how they are textualised.

• Common issues in reporting include:

  • Use of legalistic language, often stripping events of subjective meanings.

  • Comparison with other historical atrocities, such as the Holocaust, raises questions of representation.

• Importance of context in human rights documentation: Need to balance legal facts with subjective narratives.

Case Study: The Murder of Waldemar Caal Rossi

• Background on Caal Rossi:

  • Local elite member, involved in political processes during militarized times in Guatemala.

• Five major theories about his murder:

  1. Military Repression Thesis: Alleged assassination by government forces to destabilize politics.

  2. Party Political Explanation: Accusation that the Christian Democrat government killed him due to opposition party threats.

  3. Intra-state Rivalry Theory: Conflicts within military and civilian powers leading to his assassination.

  4. Inter-elite Rivalry Hypothesis: Family feud among elite families leading to his death.

  5. Moral Economy Explanation: Killing motivated by class resentment, possibly by someone poor.

• Local interpretations differed from national narratives; highlights social context and class dynamics in understanding violence.

Case Study: The Murder of Myrna Mack Chang

• Overview of Myrna Mack's assassination and its significance:

  • The case showcased struggles over classification of human rights violations.

• Official responses claimed it was a common crime, while human rights organizations viewed it as politically motivated.

• Flawed investigations and issues concerning evidence raised doubts about accountability.

  • Many details lost or ignored during the investigation, highlighting systemic failure in addressing human rights abuses.

• The importance of social context:

  • Mack's background and connections were significant in ensuring her case received international attention.

The Decontextualization of Human Rights Violations

• Many human rights reports tend to abstract personal stories into bare facts, losing complexity and meaning.

  • Focus remains on legalism rather than the emotional, subjective realities of victims.

• Reports often lack a narrative flow, which would help understand events in terms of individual experiences.

• The exclusion of familial and class backgrounds from victim profiles contributes to this decontextualization.

Theoretical Considerations

• Discusses the tension between fact and interpretation in human rights reporting:

  • Human rights cannot afford to overlook the narratives of individuals but need to document anomalies and exploit these for advocacy.

• Calls for anthropological approaches to human rights, emphasizing holistic interpretations rather than strict legal or statistical analyses.

Suggestions for Human Rights Practices

• Recommendations for human rights organizations to adopt varied representational styles:

  • Inclusion of more contextual material in reports.

  • Avoiding a one-size-fits-all legalistic approach that may hinder understanding of complex social realities.

• Human rights work should complement socio-historical analytic perspectives to better capture the lived experiences of individuals facing violations.

• Recognizing the agency of victims and their families helps to reframe human rights narratives beyond simple legal violations.

Conclusion

• The efficacy of human rights reporting to remain influential hinges on how accurately and humanely narratives of suffering and injustice are conveyed.

• Emphasizes the necessity of a diverse narrative approach that integrates local knowledge, alongside legal frameworks, to champion the cause of human rights effectively.