“CULTURE” IN UDHR 27

Culture is a complex idea that can mean many things.

Generally speaking, we tend to understand the culture in a double sense:

1. As a“whole way of life” of a people(to quote Raymond Williams).

2. As arts, sciences, and learning.

The right to “the cultural life of the community” concerns culture as a whole way of life.

This part of UDHR 27 has broad implications:

!It implies foremost that a community’s culture is intrinsic to human dignity.
!It means the right of communities to retain and develop their cultural practices. !It means that there must remain a place for cultural diversity.

!It means a duty shouldered by all people, especially governments, to respect cultural diversity and support its preservation.

Colonial attacks on Indigenous culture have happened through direct violence, the spread of disease, mass land appropriation, environmental destruction, cultural “re-education,” religious conversion, and even legislation.

Canada’s Indian Act (1876) and its numerous amendments are examples of the latter, whereby residential schools under the aegis of the IA were deployed explicitly for cultural genocide.

WWII, RAPHAEL LEMKIN, AND THE CONCEPT OF GENOCIDE

The 1930s and 1940s constitute the most violent and destructive two decades in human history.

They have rivals.

In its long history, for example, China witnessed numerous major wars that led to widespread human suffering and mass death.

In the mid-nineteenth century alone, the cynical, British-precipitated Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) and a Chinese civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) resulted in millions of military and civilian deaths.

And, of course, World War I (1914-1918) was the most catastrophic international war in human history.

During the same decade, Josef Stalin’s economic policies led to the Soviet Famine (1932-1933), which included the Holodomor or the Terror Famine in Ukraine, a catastrophe that some historians view as a deliberate attempt by Stalin to exterminate ethnic Ukrainians in the greater USSR.

Nonetheless, the programmatic slaughter of European Jews – as well as other groups, such as Poles, Roma peoples, the physically disabled, and those deemed socially deviant – by Nazi Germany, known as the Holocaust or Shoah (1941-1945), continues to stand out for its deliberate ruthlessness and bureaucratic inhumanity.

After WWII, the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis in the late 1940s and the controversial trial of Adolf Eichmann – a leading architect of the Final Solution – in the early 1960s, which resulted in his execution in 1962, were efforts to find a measure of justice for demonstrably criminal acts.

One of the vexing problems in doing so was the question of how to account for crimes of such magnitude and with such specific cultural meanings.

For this purpose, the term “genocide” was coined.

In 1944 Raphael Lemkin, an expert in criminal law who had fled Nazi persecution and whose writing informed the Nuremberg tribunal, offered the concept to describe what had happened to the European Jews, some two-thirds of whom had perished in the war.

Lemkin wrote that “the evidence produced at the Nuremberg trial gave full support to the concept of genocide.”

A neologism, genocide is comprised of two words:

genes from the Greek for race, nation, or tribe

caedere from the Latin for “to kill.”

As a legal concept, genocide was used during the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946).

During the trials, the terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” which had a much more extended pedigree dating to slavery in the US, were used synonymously and interchangeably.

The legacy of the trials and Lemkin’s intervention is the current use of the term genocide, which now refers to any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic/racial, or religious group:

!Killing members of the group

!Causing severe bodily or mental harm to members of the group

!Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

!Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE UHR

The impact of WWII and the atrocities listed above echo in the UDHR.

When speaking about culture in the context of UDHR 27 and the UDHR broadly, it is essential to consider cultural relativist critiques and arguments against them.

The basic idea is that our ethics, beliefs, and values are bound up with our cultures: it is impossible to see the world or understand ourselves without the mediation of culture.

Culture, in short, supplies the meanings we require to grasp reality.

However, cultural relativism is often accused because it implies that morality is culturally determined and that there are no universal ethical benchmarks.

Yet cultural relativism has long plagued the validity of the UDHR.

In 1947, during the discussions that produced the UDHR, the American Anthropological Association withdrew from the talks.

As anthropologist and critic of cultural relativism Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban have noted, the AAA felt that “no such declaration [the UDHR] would apply to all human beings.”

But Fluehr-Lobban herself has leveled a sharp criticism of cultural relativism of this type, arguing the idea that some practices are so abhorrent, such as domestic violence or honor killings, that strict adherence to relativism (itself an “ethics”) represents a threat to human life and dignity.

“When there is a choice between defending human rights and defending cultural relativism,” she concludes, “[we] should choose to protect and promote human rights. We cannot just be bystanders” (“Cultural Relativism and Universal Rights”).