ABSTRACT
It is hardly possible today to open a newspaper without coming across a reference to human rights. We hear almost daily about abominable violations of human rights taking place around the world and occasionally of cases being brought before the European Court of Human Rights. Additional references to human rights demonstrate how pregnant this discourse has become. For example, as I was writing this chapter, an article appeared in the Guardian about a bank in Bangladesh which only lends to the poor (report by Clive Woodcock, 16 May 1994:16). It explained that the average loan of the Grameen Bank does not exceed the equivalent of £50 over 12 months and enables the borrower (who has no experience of handling money) to start a small business (for instance through the purchase of a second-hand sewing machine) and, thus, to get out of the poverty trap in which he, but more often she, has found herself. What interests me is not so much the unusual conditions under which the Grameen Bank works (borrowers have to be in groups of five and they participate in decision-making for the bank’s operations) as the fact that the man behind it, Professor Muhammad Yunus, uses the language of human rights to describe the idea behind the successful project. He is quoted as saying that the Bank thinks that credit should not be the privilege of the fortunate few, and that it sees credit as a human right. Referring to human rights in this particular context makes sense. As I shall argue below, human rights are first and foremost political aspirations. They embody claims for a more egalitarian world, and these claims draw their strength and legitimacy precisely from the fact that they are cast in the language of ‘human rights’. The last proposition is somewhat tautological. Why this should be so is the question which has driven me to write this chapter. I shall not tackle it directly, however. Instead I shall invite anthro pologists to replace their original (and persisting) ambivalence about human rights with analysis.
