Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

Introduction. Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit

I n t r o d u c t i o n Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit Human rights. Are they universal? Our immediate response is “yes, of course.” However that simple affirmation assumes agreement about definitions of the “human” as well as what a human is entitled to under law, bringing us quickly to concepts such as “freedom ,” “property in the person,” and the “inalienability” of both.1 The assumption that we all mean the same thing by these terms carries much political import, especially given the fact that different communities (national, ethnic, religious, gendered) enact some the most basic categories of human experience (self, home, freedom, sovereignty) differently. This is why when organizations such as the United Nations draft charters, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a great deal of time is spent choosing the language (Groth 2012). Indeed, in the very preamble of this document we find a key concept of the notion of rights as what is “inalienable,” that is, unable to be separated from the self: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” There is a debate in political philosophy about what, if anything, is inalienable in the human being (Pateman 2002, 1988). The term is associated with “property in the person,” a concept that for much of American history was applied to free male subjects who (unlike slaves) owned first and foremost themselves as well as other alienable objects, including their wives and children (Pateman 1988). Personal freedoms were defined against the negative benchmark of human chattel. Thus defining the human as possessing “property in the person” assumes that one can do what one likes with that “property,” including alienating its own labor (a sovereign person can conceivably contract her- or himself into servitude). Carole Pateman thus calls 2 Introduction the notion of “inalienable rights” a “political fiction,”2 for although one cannot actually sever one’s mind from one’s laboring body, the ability to contract one’s labor to an employer demonstrates that human labor is in fact alienable as a value (1988). I will not review this debate here; however I mention it to forefront the fact that legal parameters of the “person” are not now and have never been unproblematic, yet they undergird the most basic discussions of human rights. That the Western subject has been defined as a property owner has deep implications. It associates sovereignty and freedom with private property and its tangible possession (see article 17 of the UDHR, for example).3 However what is “private” has also undergone serious transformation in light of innovations in virtual media, cyborg realities, and the posthuman, as have the parameters of the human it/her/himself (Haraway 1985; Hardt and Negri 2000; Coole and Frost 2010). Indeed, studies in the philosophy of the emotions , as well as what Patricia Brennan calls “psychoneuroendocrinology,” demonstrate that rather than being separate until proven coextensive with others (in “liminal” experiences such as religious ritual, art, music, and sexual union), people are actually together (in intangible but measurable ways) until their separateness is consciously enacted through gendered, cultural, and institutional education (Brennan 2004). “Property in the person” can no longer circulate as a general definition of the self, if it ever legitimately could, and is certainly not a universal category. What’s more, this political fiction is a very dangerous one, especially when we recognize, following Michel Serres, that property ownership goes hand in hand with one’s the ability to pollute (Serres 2011).4 The rational and sovereign Western subject not only presides over himself (I use the masculine pronoun, as historically the unmarked political subject was assumed to be male), but has deeply misrecognized the rights of other life forms, objectifying and dominating land, animals, plants, and other forms of biological life, and rendering them fodder for capitalist consumption and the detritus it produces. Tangible Intangibilities As we inquire further into the relation of “property in the person” and human rights we inevitably land in the territory of the cultural and the everyday practices that compose it. Definitions of a legal entity (a person) as one who is able to determine his or her own destiny often contradicts what we know Cultural Heritage in Transit 3 about how cultural practices overdetermine the subject, limiting...