Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights (original) (raw)

2004, South Atlantic Quarterly

especially of the more essentialist interpretations of the [culture] concept, to the point of querying its usefulness at all, they found themselves witnessing, often during fieldwork, the increasing prevalence of 'culture' as a rhetorical object-often in a highly essentialized form-in contemporary political talk" (3). 1 Just as "we" discover that culture is constructed, fluid, and ever-inventive, "they" begin to articulate demands for rights in terms of a cultural identity asserted to be primordial and fixed. This historical non-coincidence has been noticed by various parties and has been interpreted in various ways. According to David Scott, the so-called "natives" have every reason to suspect these newfangled anti-essentialist ideas, indispensable though such ideas may seem to Western academic theorists, himself included: "For whom is culture partial, unbounded, heterogeneous, hybrid, and so on, the anthropologist or the native?" (101). 2 The new concept of culture as hybrid, heterogeneous, and processual is "merely the most recent way of conceiving and explaining otherness, of putting otherness in its place" (106). It suits "post-cold war North Atlantic liberalism" (107), for it offers a way of playing down "ideological conflicts" (107). 3 As