ABSTRACT
Human rights are universal legal and moral categories of one Enlightenment political tradition, namely, liberalism. Apartheid theorists were ardent cultural relativists, dividing humanity into separate cultural groups that required “separate development.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the archetypal transitional statutory body created to promote a “culture of human rights” in South Africa. Classic liberal political visions seek to confine culture, race, and ethnicity to the private domain and exclude them from the public space. One consequence is that in human rights cases, plaintiffs cannot use race, ethnicity, or culture as categories to contextualize their political behavior. Ethnonationalists assert a bounded and shared Herderian version of culture that is congruent with the Boasian tradition in cultural anthropology. Culture is never just an analytical category, contained securely within the walls of the academy; it is the bricks and mortar of nation builders and other communitarians.
