Unit 10: Globalization and Human Rights

From the outset of this course, I have emphasized the centrality of culture to the
everyday lives of individuals. We have noted the ways in which the values, beliefs,
and practices into which individuals are enculturated from the very earliest stages of
their lives can come to be experienced as second nature and can shape their very sense
of self. At the same time, I have also consistently questioned reductive notions of
culture that would treat social groups as though they were homogenous or unchanging
and closed off to global flows. Following the work of Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz, for
instance, I noted in Unit 3 that even prior to colonization, no society ever existed in
isolation from all others, and that colonization introduced new global flows that linked
societies together and transformed them, often with devastating consequences for
many colonized peoples. As of the 20th century, transformations in media and
communications technologies have led to ever more intensified connections between
different parts of the world. In this final unit of the course, we turn our attention to the
dynamics of globalization. We examine how globalization has led to both new
opportunities and new forms of inequality for certain social groups around the world,
how it has reshaped citizenship and relationships to the nation and to nation-states,
and how it has affected and is affected by broader cultural and social beliefs, values,
and practices. Finally, we turn our attention to the question of human rights,
examining how, in the 20th and 21st centuries, anthropologists have attempted to
navigate between respect for local cultures and new international commitments to
human rights.

In this unit, we will address two main topics:

1. Globalization

2. Anthropology and Human Rights

Learning Objectives
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

1. Define and explain some of the major anthropological approaches to globalization.

2. Explain how globalization has transformed the experiences of citizenship and

nationality for some individuals, including through phenomenon such as diaspora and
flexible citizenship.
3. Discuss anthropological approaches to human rights and describe how
anthropologists attempt to balance respect for cultural difference with commitment to
social justice.

Assigned Reading and Viewing

Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods, Chapter 13.

How to Proceed
1. Read Chapter 13 of Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods.

2. Read the unit instructional notes, including completing the student exercise.

3. Complete the review questions.

Instructional Content
Part I: Globalization

1.1 Globalization: An Introduction

1.2 Globalization and Citizenship

1.3 Cultural Imperialism vs. Cultural Hybridity

Part II: Anthropology and Human Rights

2.1 Culture and Human Rights

2.2 Child Prostitution in Thailand

Part I: Globalization
As I have noted throughout this course, social dynamics and cultural practices and
beliefs in every society have long been affected by transnational processes that linked
societies together and transformed them. Such transnational connections were
intensified and took on a particular shape under colonization.
The 20th century witnessed yet another significant transformation in how societies
around the world are linked together, as new communications and transportations
technologies, from the telephone and the train, to the Internet and ubiquitous air
travel, created ever more constant and rapid connections between peoples around the
world. These transformations have caused many scholars and observers to
characterize the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an era of “globalization,”
which your textbook defines as the “reshaping of local conditions by powerful global
forces on an ever-intensifying scale” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015: 320).

In the first part of this unit, we will introduce some of the ways in which
anthropologists have theorized and approached the study of contemporary
globalization.

1.1 Globalization and Inequality

Globalization affects individuals around the world, of every class and national
background. However, as your textbook notes, it is important to observe that
globalization may impact different social groups in different ways, for instance by
leading to both new forms of inequality and new opportunities for international
organizing for marginalized groups.

We have already seen one example of how globalization can lead to exploitation and
inequality in our examination of the effects of global capitalism. In Units 6 and 7, I
noted that corporations may often seek to increase profits by virtue of outsourcing
labour to areas of the world where workers are paid less and work in conditions with
inadequate environmental, health, and safety conditions. Beads at New Orleans’
Mardi Gras parade or “cheap fashion” such as the clothing of Joe Fresh or Gap, are
thus produced for Western consumers at the expense of the exploitation of workers in
developing countries such as China or Bangladesh.

As your textbook notes, anthropologists such as Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp have
also note how globalization can lead to unequal and exploitative divisions of labour
even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. They argue that the twentieth century
has seen the rise of what they term “stratified reproduction” (Lavenda, Schultz, and
Dods 2015: 324). In many cases, they observe, middle-class and wealthy families in
the Global North may obtain childcare from immigrant workers from the Global
South, who in turn send part of their earnings home as remittances to help fund
grandparents and other relatives who take over the task of raising these individuals’
own children. In this way, the labour of poor people in the Global South is exploited
to facilitate the ability of the middle-class and the wealthy to raise families. At other
times, such stratified forms of reproduction may also be seen in global divisions in the
use of reproductive technologies. In recent years, India, for instance, has become one
of the world’s most important suppliers of surrogate mothers, who, for a fee, help
individuals from the Global North have biological children when they would
otherwise be unable to do so.

At the same time, globalization can also provide new opportunities for the poor and
the dispossessed. Thus, as your textbook discusses, while both colonialism and
globalization often brought disease, devastation, and misery to indigenous peoples, in
recent years, indigenous groups have been increasingly successful at forming global
social and political movements to defend their rights. In the 1980s, indigenous groups
in the Amazon organized together under the leadership of the Kayapo to prevent the
construction of a proposed hydroelectric dam. Their successful campaign against the
dam relied in great part on the ability to combine indigenous political skills with
knowledge of Portuguese and media savviness. Various Kayapo chiefs toured Europe
and appeared publicly with well-known celebrities, including the rock star, Sting, to
support their cause. This movement had some temporary success. However, in 2010,
the Brazilian government renewed plans for construction of the dam, which, as of
2017, is currently under construction. When built, it is anticipated that this dam will
lead to the displacement of thousands of indigenous peoples and the destruction of
thousands of square kilometres of rainforest. This example thus illustrates both how
indigenous peoples can make use of global media flows and the new alliances that
they open up in order to organize for their rights, and also the difficulties and
challenges that face any local or global social movement.

1.2 Globalization and Citizenship

Globalization has also led to new challenges to the nation-state. As noted in Unit 9,
the nation-state is a relatively recent construct, having come into being as a way of
dividing up territories and legitimizing governments after the loss of belief in the
divine rights of monarchs that characterized the Middle Ages. By the twentieth
century, however, the idea that individual nations have the right to self-determination
and that the world should, at least ideally, be divided into autonomous and self-
governing nation states was widespread and often taken for granted. The United
Nations, for instance, which was put into place following World War II, provides an
excellent example of the idea that the world should be divided into separate self-
governing nations, even as it starts to undermine the separateness of these nation-
states. While the U.N. presupposes the existence of separate nation-states, it also
forges new international connections by bringing separate nation-states together in an
attempt at some form of collective governance and regulation of the world’s affairs.

As this example already begins to suggest, the increased flows of people, technology,
capital, and ideologies unleased by globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries have in fact increasingly undermined the autonomy of nation-states. This
can be seen, for instance, in the new types of dynamics that have come to characterize
the relationships between individuals and nation-states. As we have seen previously,
colonization sparked the mass displacement of whole groups of people through
processes such as the slave trade and indentured labour. The twentieth and twenty-
first centuries have similarly seen massive displacements, as individuals migrate from
one nation to the next in hopes of better economic opportunities or to flee political
oppression in their home countries.

Under globalization, the boundaries of the nation-state are thus frequently undermined
or manipulated through a variety of mobile populations. Your textbook notes a variety
of concepts that have been devised by scholars to try to capture these sorts of
dynamics. A transborder state refers to a “form of state in which it is claimed that
those people who left the country and their descendants remain part of their ancestral
state, even if they are citizens of another state” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015:
327). In other words, in such cases, citizens of a particular state continue to be
claimed as members of that state even after they have left it to live elsewhere.
A transborder citizenry, in turn, refers to the inclusion as citizens of both individuals
who were born in or otherwise acquired citizenship within a particular nation-state
and continue to reside there and individuals who are citizens of that nation-state but
now reside abroad. As your textbook notes, transborder states and transborder
citizenries may be concretized in law. Thus, Canadians can hold dual citizenship with
other countries and also continue to be considered citizens of Canada even if they
move elsewhere, although in most circumstances they lose certain privileges and
rights within Canada – such as the right to vote – if they live elsewhere for a defined
period. Several other countries allow emigrants who become naturalized citizens to
retain their citizenship of origin. The terms transborder state and transborder citizenry
thus capture the ways in which the global movements of people can lead to more
complicated legal and social identifications of citizenship than the ideal of a single
nation-state inhabited by a people of common national origin or single citizenship
status allows.

A final term is also useful for capturing the mobile and flexible nature of citizenship
and claims to nationhood in a globalizing world. Diaspora refers to “migrant
populations who live in a variety of different locales around the world” (Lavenda,
Schutlz, and Dods 2015: 327). They are individuals, in other words, who claim a
shared national or cultural identity but do not live in a single nation-state, even if they
in many cases claim a shared identity or ancestry through a common national origin.
In some cases, a diaspora may become involved in political struggles within their
homeland or may even develop countering nationalist narratives. After the triumph of
the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the declaration of Cuba as socialist in 1961, for
instance, there was a mass exodus of many Cubans, often middle-class and white, who
disagreed with the new government’s policies. Leaving behind their homes and taking
only with them their belongings, they left primarily for Miami. The Cuban presence in
Miami, in turn, is now so strong that there is even a neighbourhood in Miami called
Little Havana.

Over the course of the decades that have followed, Miami and Havana have in many
ways emerged as competing capitals, with each city and its population claiming to
represent the “true” Cuban nation. These competing claims can be seen in each city’s
architecture and design of its public space. Both cities, for instance, have multiple
busts and statues of the 19th century Cuban national hero, journalist, poet, and
revolutionary José Martí, demonstrating how the two cities lay competing claims to
the nationalist narrative for which he serves as an emblem. If for decades Cubans on
the island and the exile or diasporic Cuban population off the island have historically
been in a standoff, however, recent years have seen important changes in their
relationship. In the early 1990s, Cuba entered into a deep economic crisis after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, which had previously been its primary trading partner.
In the context of this crisis, and with the approval and support of the Cuban
government, intellectuals, artists, and citizens on the island sought new and improved
relationships with their relations off the island. Indeed, the economy of the island
became increasingly dependent on remittances or money sent to relatives from
relatives abroad in the diaspora.

Other anthropologists have noted how globalization may lead to new, flexible
approaches to citizenship by elites as they take advantage of financial opportunities
opened up through taking up residence in areas around the world while drawing on
kinship relations. As coined by anthropologists Aihwa Ong, the concept of flexible
citizenship refers to “strategies employed by individuals who regularly move across
state boundaries in order to circumvent and benefit from different nation-state
regimes” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015: 328). Ong came up with this concept as
a means of describing the strategies adopted by diasporic communities of elite
Chinese families. These families, with whom Ong conducted research, have played
key roles in the economic rise of the Pacific Rim in recent years. Many observers have
attributed the economic success of these nations and these families to “Chinese
culture.” Ong, however, rejects such essentializing and reductive, culturalist
explanations.

She argues instead that this diasporic elite owes their financial success to the ways in
which they evaded or exploited three different kinds of institutions: Chinese kinship
and family; the nation-state; the marketplace. Key to the economic success of these
diasporic elites was their ability to both break with mainland Chinese kinship ties and,
in their place, to reinforce new bonds among family members and business partners
that were measured in terms of guanxi, or “social connections built primarily on
shared identities such as native place, kinship, or attending the same school”
(Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015: 328). These new ties created through guanxi were
then further reinforced by the development of a set of values and practices centred on
the wellbeing of the family. As Ong argues, individuals in this social group derive
their sense of moral worth both from their diligence in income0-making activities as
well as their compliance with parental wishes. Children, and, in particular, sons, were
often focused on raising the prestige of their family by seeking out and succeeding at
education and well-paid jobs. These efforts in turn, then, helped to raise the prestige
and class status of whole families.

While cultivating family discipline and loyalty as well as considerable wealth and
strong interpersonal ties, elite Chinese diasporic communities also actively worked to
evade and take advantage of a variety of nation-states. Thus, Ong notes that none of
the overseas Chinese she knew expressed any commitment to nationalism. Instead,
they were frequently strategic in seeking out citizenship in a variety of nation-states.
When the British decided to award citizenship to some Hong Kong residents in the
1990s, they used a point system that favoured applicants with education, fluency in
English, and training in professions such as accountancy and law. Other nations, such
as England, similarly favoured the educated and wealthy. The Chinese families with
whom Ong worked thus strategically set about acquiring passports and citizenship in a
variety of countries.

And finally, elite diasporic Chinese communities utilized family ties and new legal
citizenship in a variety of nation-states to strategically position themselves as best
they could in a global economy. The families with Ong worked would thus often take
steps to position family members in strategic locations around the globe to improve
family businesses and fortunes. In the case of one family, the eldest son remained in
Hong Kong to run part of the family hotel chain located in the Pacific region, while
his brother relocated to San Francisco and managed the family hotels located in North
America and Europe. While locating family members strategically in this way could
often help improve a family’s finances, it also produced new conflicts and tensions.
For example, children might be left in one country to be educated, while their parents
managed businesses in other countries on different continents. In some cases, such
distances could lead to strains on marriages and in parent-children relationships. At
the same time, Ong observed that many of the individuals with whom she worked
truly seemed to live comfortably as citizens of the world. One Chinese banker who
resided in San Francisco commented to Ong, “I can live anywhere in the world, but it
must be near an airport” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015: 329).
Ong concludes that for these elite Chinese, the concept of nationalism had lost its
meaning. Instead, they seemed to subscribe to a post-national ethos in which they
“submit to the regulations of the capitalist market while trying to evade the
regulations of nation-states, ultimately because their only true loyalty is to the family
business” (Lavanda, Schultz, and Dods 2105: 329). By taking strategic advantage of
family bonds and a flexible approach to citizenship, these elite Chinese families
accrued ever greater wealth. Crucially however, Ong notes that this particular form of
flexible and post-national citizenship is available only to elites, and often relied on
reviving other forms of oppression along lines of age, gender, and class.

1.3 Cultural Imperialism vs. Cultural Hybridity

In addition to examining the ways in which globalization can lead to changing

relationships of mobile populations to nation-states, anthropologists have engaged in a
series of debates about the ways in which increased global flows affects and is
affected by other cultural, social, and economic values and beliefs. Your textbook
attempts to capture some of the ways in which anthropologists and other scholars have
theorized the impact of globalization on local cultures through the concepts of cultural
imperialism and cultural hybridity.

The cultural imperialist view of globalization has also sometimes been referred to as
the “McDonaldization of the world.” Largely devised outside of anthropology, this
view of globalization argues that in recent years Western cultures have come to
dominate all others and that this domination takes the form of erasing all other cultural
particularities and assimilating dominated cultures to Western forms. Thus, according
to this idea Western cultural imperialism destroys “local music, technology, dress, and
food traditions, and replac[es] them with rock and roll, radios, flashlights, cellphones
t-shirts, blue jeans, McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca cola.” The end result of this
spread of Western culture around the globe is a “cultural homogenization of the
world” that ultimately “dooms the world to uniformity” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods
2015: 338).

Arguments about cultural imperialism have often served the useful purposes of
drawing the attention of local populations to the threat posed by Western culture
industries, such as Hollywood, and hence the need to foster and protect local
creativity and cultural production. For instance, it is in part out of a desire to protect
local cultural production that countries ranging from Canada to Cuba provide funding
for the arts or institute regulations requiring a certain percentage of “Canadian” or
“Cuban” content in local media.

At the same time, the cultural imperialism thesis has proven unsatisfactory for three
reasons. First, the notion of cultural imperialism denies agency to non-Western
peoples. It frequently assumes that individuals in the Global South or, indeed,
anywhere outside of the United States, will passively receive Western goods as these
are used and intended in their own contexts of origin. In fact, however, studies have
shown that individuals will often adapt these goods according to their own cultural or
social needs and practices.

Second, the cultural imperialism thesis tends to assume that global flows move only in
one direction: from the West to the rest. In fact, non-Western foods, music, and
material culture may often acquire large followings and influence around the world,
both flowing between nations in the Global South and from the Global South into the
Global North. Recent years, for instance, have seen an enormous rise in popularity in
South Korean television dramas and pop music. The fact that audiences around the
world were singing and dancing along to Psy-Daddy’s “Gangnam Style,” for instance,
indicates that global flows may flow in more than one direction.

Finally, expanding on this second point, global flows my sometimes bypass the West
altogether in ways that prove significant for local cultural practices and beliefs.
Anthropologist Brian Larkin (1997), for instance, notes that Indian movies have
captured the interests and passions of Hausa people in Northern Nigeria. He argues
that the Hausa enjoy Indian films because they detect cultural similarities in dress,
food, orientation to family, and in growing tensions between traditional notions of
marriage as a family oriented practice versus emerging ideals of romance. Hausa turn
to Indian films in order to negotiate tensions between tradition and new ideals of
romance, thus creating a parallel modernity, or a notion of what is “modern” or up to
date that neither subscribes to nor is founded on resistance to Western ideals.

These observations have led many anthropologist to turn away from the cultural
imperialism thesis and embrace instead arguments that fall more within what your
textbook terms the thesis of cultural hybridity or creolization. This argument ties back
to earlier work within anthropology. As your textbook notes, from Franz Boas and his
students on, anthropologists have long observed that local cultural groups generally
borrow practices/features from other cultures in order to adapt them to local purposes.
Similarly, arguments re cultural hybridity and creolization emphasis how people may
accept or adopt goods and practices originating from the West or elsewhere while
domesticating and indigenizing them, finding a way to reconcile them with local
practices.

At the same time, this shouldn’t lead us to indiscriminately celebrate the concept of
cultural hybridity. First, your textbook cautions that such a view can mistakenly lead
us to reinforce the idea of cultures as bounded entities that are first pure and then
become mixed. Instead of treating cultures as pure, we must acknowledge and
emphasize the ways in which, as I have insisted from the outset of this course,
cultures are not and have never been self-contained, timeless, and homogenous
wholes. Rather, the boundaries between different cultural groups are porous and
fuzzy, cultures often change over time, and cultures are internally diverse and non-
homogenous.

Second, we need also to be aware of the ways in which practices of cultural hybridity
may themselves reflect and reinforce different forms of stratification and inequality.
Thus, your textbook cites the example of how “world music,” as marketed to middle-
class Western consumers may turn culture into an easily digestible and commodified
good while deflecting attention from the urgency of political mobilization that would
address racism, class exploitation, and other forms of global inequality.

Part II: Anthropology and Human Rights

As mentioned earlier, organizations such as the United Nations can be seen as both
reflecting and undermining early twentieth century ideals that the world should be
organized into separate and sovereign nation-states. The UN has also played an active
role in determining and working to reinforce and foster human rights around the
world. Anthropologists have frequently been involved in helping to develop and fight
for human rights around the world. Yet at the same time, as we will see in this last
part of this unit, part of the role that anthropologists have played in human rights
issues is by drawing attention to the need for an approach to local cultural practices
that examines them within their own context and does not presume the superiority of
one set of values and beliefs over another. In other words, and returning to concepts
with which we began this course, human rights brings up thorny questions about how
to balance efforts at social justice while also combatting ethnocentrism and taking
cultural relativity seriously.

2.1 Culture and Human Rights

The UN Declaration on Human Rights was drafted in the wake of World War II and
was part of an international effort to prevent such atrocities as the Holocaust from
ever occurring again. From the outset, anthropologists had important and often
conflicting investments in and approaches to questions of human rights. Thus, for
instance, in 1947, anthropologist Melville Herskovitz argued that the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights was largely being drafted by people from western
societies, and that it needed to take into account cultural difference. But where he
called for cultural relativism to govern attempts to establish universal human rights,
other anthropologists argued that respect for and understanding of cultural difference
should not preclude attempts to combat inequalities wherever they may exist. Out of
this initial concern about the need to balance respect for cultural difference with
international efforts to combat social injustice, anthropologists have developed a
number of different positions and proposals.

As your textbook points out, some anthropologists have argued that human rights are
opposed to culture. From this perspective, people have no choice but to follow the
rules of the culture into which they are born. International interference with local
customs that are said to violate human rights would thus seem to itself constitute a
human rights violation. It would involve disrupting a supposedly harmonious way of
life and preventing those who are committed to such a way of life from observing
their own culturally specific understandings about human rights and obligations to one
another. From this perspective, then, cultures should be allowed to enjoy absolute,
inviolable protection from interference by outsiders.

This perspective is one that our approach in this course already puts into question.
From the outset of this course, we have resisted views that see cultures as internally
homogenous, unchanging, and cut off from one another. An argument that opposes
human rights to culture typically takes exactly this sort of reified vision of culture,
ignoring the fact that there may be groups within a society who are themselves
opposed to certain cultural practices. Such an easy opposition between notions of
international human rights and culture also ignores the fact that cultural beliefs and
practices are often subject to historical change.

A more productive attempt to reconcile anthropology’s long-standing commitment to

respect for difference and cultural relativism can be seen in arguments that culture
itself is something that should be seen as a universal human right. This perspective, to
put this otherwise, maintains that all peoples have a universal human right to maintain
their own distinct cultures. The rights to culture argument, as your textbook notes, is
an interesting twist on the rights versus culture argument. It concedes that universal
human rights do exist, but insists on the importance of culture to the lives of
individuals and social groups by declaring the preservation and protection of culture
to itself be a universal human right. This argument, nonetheless, runs into difficulties.
First, human rights are legally interpreted as rights that belong to individuals rather
than to groups. Second, individuals are supposed to seek redress at the level of the
nation-state when their human rights are not being respected. This can frequently lead
to difficulties, since nation-states may either be the perpetrators of human rights
abuses or be unwilling to step in to defend the human rights of individuals living
within their boundaries. In such cases, international organizations such as the UN
have often been reluctant to intervene, thus undermining the effectiveness of ideals of
human rights.

Finally, arguments about how international human rights may come into conflict with
local cultural practices and beliefs and/or may themselves be difficult to enforce has
led to a third approach to human rights, one in which human rights discourse and
practice is itself analyzed as a culture. The main argument here is that the concept of
human rights and the ways in which these are managed are themselves based on
cultural ideas about human beings, their social connections, their needs, and their
ability to exercise agency. More specifically, this approach argues that notions of what
counts as a human right frequently takes Western conceptualizations of individuals
and society for granted. The emphasis on the individual over the collective within
human rights discourse, for instance, reflects the ways in which the self is primarily
viewed as autonomous and self-determining in post-Enlightenment western discourse.
Recognizing how human rights discourse is itself based on certain conceptions of
individuals and societies can in turn shed light on the ways in which it may shape and
constrain how social groups can bring forward cases. Members of Indigenous groups,
for instance, may well see their cultures as diverse and changing. They may insist on
and recognize the need both to maintain and to transform traditional cultural practices.
But because human rights law is often oriented towards recognizing claims made on
the basis of cultural authenticity and tradition, indigenous groups who want to pursue
legal claims are often forced to represent their cultures as far more homogenous and
stable than their members see them as.

2.2 Child Prostitution in Thailand

The case of child prostitution in Thailand discussed by your textbook further

demonstrate the complicated ways in which anthropological orientations towards
cultural relativity can help better the search for human rights. Your textbook
summarizes the work of anthropologist Heather Montgomery in a slum settlement in
Baan Nua, Thailand, which was situated near a seaside resort that catered to foreign
tourists. Montgomery noted that the residents of the settlement had in many cases
moved there from other areas of the country. As a result, they had broken ties with
other family members and, often, ties between parents and children living together in
the settlement were quite strong.

One of the values operative among these families was that children were bound by
duty to help support their families. Children turned to a variety of jobs in order to help
their families, including, for instance, begging. But in most cases, they inevitably
became involved in prostitution. Children could earn five times as much money
working as prostitutes as they could from begging. Through prostitution, they also
gained access to fancy hotels and good meals. Moreover, many clients developed
long-term relationships with the families of the child prostitutes, often lending them
large sums of money. In one case, a client provided a family with financial support
sufficient to rebuild their home. Montgomery notes that families were not comfortable
with the idea that children were prostituting themselves. At the same time, however,
both parents and children themselves often interpreted prostitution as the child’s way
of fulfilling their duty to help their families. Families were also better able to settle the
question of the ethics of the prostitution because it was typically friends and
neighbours of the child rather than mothers who introduced them into prostitution. As
a result, mothers were able to claim that they had learned too late that their child was
engaging in prostitution.

This case thus demonstrates some of the ways in which local cultural practices can
come into conflict with human rights discourse. First, human rights discourse is based
on a Western – and relatively recent Western – ideas of what constitutes an acceptable
human childhood and when childhood begins and ends. The model of ideal Western
childhood contained in the UN convention on the rights of the child includes the idea
that, as Montgomery puts it, “every child has a right to a childhood that is free from
the responsibilities of work, money, and sex” (Lavenda, Schultz and Dods 2015: 336).
The problem with this standard is that it can often come into conflict with local
cultural norms. Applying Western ideals of what constitutes an appropriate childhood
to all cultures may thus constitute a form of cultural imperialism.

A further conflict comes into play within human rights discourse itself. Local Thai
activities have been particularly interested in enforcing Article 34 of the Convention,
which aims to protect children “from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual
abuse” (Lavenda, Schultz, and Dods 2015: 336). But the Convention also recognizes
the rights of children to live with their families. Montgomery notes that too often one
of these rights ends up being prioritized in a way that downplays the other. Thus, she
notes that Article 34 – the human rights article that aims to protect children from
sexual exploitation – is frequently quoted in isolation, without linking it to the broader
problems of poverty and discrimination faced by the children and their families. In the
case of the Baan Nua community, for instance, a judgement that said that children
should be removed from their families because they were engaging in prostitution in
that context would be in conflict with the children’s rights to remain with their
families.

As we noted in the first unit of this course, cultural relativism demands that we situate
practices within their own cultural context. In this case, Montgomery adopts a
culturally relativistic perspective on child prostitution, noting how this activity
responds to the poverty of families in this region as well as values that expect children
to do help support families. But at the same time, cultural relativism is not the same as
moral relativism. Thus, Montgomery does not conclude that we should condone or
accept child prostitution in Baan Nua. Rather, she ultimately concludes that the best
way to address the problem would be to help the families find alternative ways of
having sustainable incomes while allowing them to remain together rather than by
enforcing punitive measures on the children’s parents.

As this case shows then, anthropology’s nuanced attention to local cultural contexts
and its efforts to resist ethnocentric assumptions can thus often find important applied
uses, rather in the fields of human rights efforts or, as Chapter 14 of your textbook
discusses, in numerous other contexts ranging from international development to
helping businesses develop culturally sensitive practices. But perhaps one of the
primary uses of anthropology is that, as a discipline, by exposing researchers and
students to the wide range of cultural beliefs and practices that exist in the world, it
can help us gain critical insight into our own beliefs and practices; to understand that
these are not simply natural, right, and universal, but historically and culturally
contingent in their own right; and, as a result, to gain new respect for the values and
practices of others.

Review Questions
1. Define cultural imperialism and cultural hybridity as approaches to globalization.
What are the three arguments that anthropologists have developed to complicate a
cultural imperialism approach to globalization?

2. What is a diaspora? How can diaspora complicate claims about who represents the
nation?

3. Define flexible citizenship. Who coined this concept? What social dynamics and
strategies does it describe?

4. How have anthropologists attempted to reconcile human rights discourse with

respect for local cultural practices and beliefs? Describe the conflicts between culture
and human rights discourse that arises in the case of child prostitution in Baan Nua.
How does Heather Montgomery argue that we should reconcile this conflict?

References
Larkin, Brian. 1997. “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of
Parallel

Modernities,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 67.3: 406-440.

Lavenda, Robert H., Emily A. Schultz, and Roberta Robin Dods. 2015. Cultural
Anthropology:
A Perspective on the Human Condition, 3rd Canadian Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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