This chapter explores sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of human rights. Anthropologists and sociologists have typically been either positivists or relativists. Consequently they have been slow to develop an analysis of justice and rights, thus lagging behind other disciplines in analysing the growth of universal human rights. This chapter shows how sociology and anthropology finally engaged with the concept of universal human rights after a long disciplinary focus on cultural relativism and legal positivism. It considers how sociology expanded its analysis of citizenship rights to that of human rights and how anthropology turned its ethnographic methodology towards an examination of the ‘social life of rights’. It also describes ‘social constructionism’ as a common bond between sociology and anthropology, laying emphasis on the importance of sociological and anthropological perspectives to the study of human rights.
Chapter
6. Sociological and Anthropological Approaches
Damien Short
Chapter
The Social Life of Human Rights
Damien Short
This chapter looks
into the development of sociological approaches to the study of human rights. It
explains how sociology covered the ride of human rights through shared human
vulnerability and collective sympathy, institutional threats, and assertion of
powerful class interests, while anthropology deepened the understanding of
socially constructed rights. Sociologists tend to view rights as inventions or
products of human social interaction and power relations. The chapter then
expounds on the concept of social constructionism in relation to power and
social structure. It also explains that an ethnographic approach to human rights
showcases how human rights function and their meaning to different social actors
in varying social contexts.
Chapter
Ethnography
Chowra Makaremi
This chapter highlights ethnography, which is a method developed in the practice of ethnology, a subdiscipline of anthropology dedicated to the study of peoples using a micro-analytical and comparative perspective. Ethnographic methods such as immersion and micro-analysis have influenced qualitative research in sociology since the rise of the Chicago school of sociology. However, it is only since the 1970s that anthropologists have started to apply their research methods to their own societies. A founding principle of ethnographic knowledge lies in the notion of alterity and the idea that being an outsider to a culture may bring specific insights and questions about dimensions of social life that are interiorized as ‘natural’ and obvious by those native to that culture. What opened the path to ethnographizing one’s own society was the understanding that this productive and scientific use of alterity was not related to some intrinsic qualities of the researchers or the people they study, but to the ability to develop an estranged gaze, even on one’s own social world.
