Universal Human Rights and the Problem of Unbounded Cultural Meanings

Abstract

Freedom from violence stands as an important candidate for a universal human right. By definition, however, such rights apply only to phenomena that are universally perceived and experienced and take predictable expression, a possibility that many contemporary interpretations of cultural theory reject. Yet people who live dramatically different lives—on tourist islands in the West Indies or as hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders in Arctic regions—agree about components that comprise a unitary phenomenon legitimately called violence. This is consistent with findings from cognitive and neruological science and with a more Geertzian theory that culture understood as meaning is not a thing, cultural variability occurs between individuals, and cultural consensus emerges as a necessary consequence of social interaction among people who participate in common social fields, who engage in common social discourse.