Features

What is a human right?

Freedom from torture and arbitrary imprisonment. Freedom to speak openly about your political beliefs. The right to be counted in court and represented in government. Both the twentieth-century human rights movement and the expanding ideal of democratic political representation grow from the same root idea: that each human being deserves dignity and respect.

This year, three Radcliffe fellows are looking into how this idea has played out in different parts of the world. How do postcolonial Morocco, Siam/Thailand, and contemporary Latin America grapple with human rights and with the political realities of divisions by race, class, and sex?

Morocco

In 1999, as a Fulbright fellow, MIT anthropology professor Susan Slyomovics RI '03 arrived in Morocco, a place she had visited and studied many times before. But this was to be a very different sojourn. King Hassan II, who for thirty-eight years had overseen forced disappearances, mass political trials, illegal detentions, and torture, had just died. Within days, his son and heir to the throne, King Mohammed VI, announced a commitment to the rule of law and human rights. "I was swept into the joyful events," says Slyomovics. "It seemed like a different Morocco."

While arriving in the midst of a regime change was fortuitous, Slyomovics's involvement in Morocco's human rights efforts went back twenty years. At Berkeley in the 1970s, she and other progressive graduate students were involved with an Amnesty International group that was assigned a Moroccan political prisoner. Over the decades, she stayed in touch with Moroccan dissidents and visited regularly, while becoming an anthropologist and folklorist specializing in Arabic cultures and the Middle East.

In the new Morocco, King Mohammed's first action was to launch an indemnity commission, which would assess and pay damages to the state's past human rights victims--and which granted amnesty to the torturers and other responsible officials. The country erupted into vigorous debate. Shouldn't there be a truth commission first? Who should be counted as a victim? "How do you ask for money, how do you assess financially the damages of lost youth, tortured bodies, and years of incarceration?" Slyomovics asks. Until then, all such political discussion had been mortally dangerous. And so, she says, "I was delighted to record and document this open debate."

Slyomovics's goal this year is to write a history of Moroccan human rights activism since independence, and to relate that activism to dissent throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The project circles a question that has been central to her work over the past decades: How are history and culture transmitted to nonliterate citizens? How do artists of all kinds--poets, painters, ritual performers, storytellers--help to recreate a civil society after a time of deprivation, repression, and terror? "In cases like Morocco where you don't have government archives, documentation, or reports," says Slyomovics, a crucial record is "what artists and writers say that world was like. How do you analyze that kind of cultural production and variety of texts?"

Along the way, she's examining how Moroccan resistance has been gendered. For instance, Slyomovics notes, while male political prisoners were identified by number, female prisoners were given men's names--perhaps because how they had already behaved, or how they would soon be treated, violated the cultural ideal that a woman always remains silent.

Siam/Thailand

A century before the contemporary human rights movement, Siam's concern was how to escape colonization. Alone in Southeast Asia, Siam never had an imperial master, a fact the country remains quite proud of. But how much sovereignty did Siam in fact have? That question is being investigated by Cornell University history professor Tamara Loos RI '03, who is researching how Siam (now Thailand) modernized in the years from the mid-1800s to the 1930s. After many Western countries and Japan imposed a series of unequal treaties on Siam, Loos explains, Siam conferred with a team of international advisers to help modernize its legal codes (such as replacing legal polygyny with monogamous marriage) as a way to throw off that semi-imperial yoke.

Loos's book will be the first to examine how this legal regime was created and applied. In doing so, she hopes to show how a noncolonial country found its own way into modernity--while retaining some familiar Siamese divisions of rank and rights by class, sex, ethnicity, and marital status. "This was not simply a process of modeling Thailand on the United States or on Britain," she explains, "but a much more complicated process of 'transculturation.'"

Among Loos's findings is that imported political concepts such as "liberty" were applied quite differently in Siam than in Europe. The word itself was translated into Thai as "issaraphap," which implies not Jeffersonian notions of freedom and equality but hierarchical notions of authority or power over one's self and others. Your class and sex defined whether you had "issaraphap": a young woman might never have it, going directly from her father's authority to her husband's--and if she took a lover, he might have to pay either the father or husband whose rights he had invaded. And yet even that imperfect shift opened up legal avenues that let the powerless challenge the powerful in court.

Loos's work will make it clear that "histories of Thailand that are allegedly gender-neutral are in fact gender-blind, that when writing about 'people' they are really writing mostly about men." Although that may sound familiar to Western feminists, not all these legal concepts will. Among the cases Loos has examined is that of a woman who fled the royal family to run off with a servant, selling herself into slavery along with him. When discovered, the princess was imprisoned, as Loos translates from the record, for "'the evil of being born human [yet] not knowing to protect her freedom [but rather] debasing herself by becoming a slave.'"

Latin America

The explicit class and sex stratifications of nineteenth-century Siam may seem quaint, but in practice modern democracies do offer more power and recognition to some groups than others. As Mala Htun RI '03, a professor of political science at New School University, notes, most Western countries remain ruled almost entirely by white men. That's less true in Latin America, where more women hold political office than in the United States. Women hold 40 percent of Colombia's cabinet posts; 31 percent and 36 percent of the seats in Argentina's lower and upper legislative chambers; and 35 percent of Costa Rica's Congressional seats.

During the 1990s, twelve Latin American countries passed laws requiring a minimum percentage of women in national political office. "But only Colombia," says Htun, "approved any institutional mechanism to represent groups defined by race. Why did women, but not Afro-Latins and indigenous peoples, get group representation in politics?"

Htun came to this question in part because here in the United States, she explains, "there's a certain essentialist way of thinking about race and ethnicity. We hyphenate groups: Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans. I always wondered why having some deviation from white makes you a different kind of American." All those groups, African Americans in particular, have at some point been held back by American laws, rules, or policies that explicitly refused them entry to everything from bathrooms to voting booths, from universities to jobs--making racial discrimination obvious and visible.

Latin American countries have had no such legal segregation--and have much more flexible color categories, with a wide spectrum of classifications. "No matter what color or ancestry you have in Brazil," explains Htun, "you're seen as Brazilian." Nevertheless, Latin American countries still host racism: the elites are white, the poor are dark. "There have been experiments conducted in Brazil in which equally dressed people apply for jobs, and the darker-skinned people get thrown out," says Htun. "Darker color is associated culturally with being lower class, less educated, and less proper." Combatting this has been difficult, in part, because of the expansive racial categories. "When racism is subtle and hidden and denied, it's harder to organize against it. Who's part of your group? How do people organize as black if they're thinking of themselves as brown or a little dark or mostly white?"

As a result, in Latin America "racial quotas are more controversial than women's quotas," Htun explains. "Latin Americans have a lot invested in the idea that race doesn't matter; they don't want to admit there's a racial divide." Further, adding women to politics doesn't threaten the power structure; most political women have been from the elite. Says Htun, "Afro-Latins are among the less moneyed classes. Including them in politics is therefore much more threatening to the existing class system."

Nevertheless, in 2001, the Brazilian government started to endorse the idea of quotas and affirmative action for blacks. This year, Htun is researching and analyzing that change. How have Latin American women and racial groups gained (or failed to gain) group political recognition? What happens--good, bad, and otherwise--when countries divvy up rights and recognitions by group?

E. J. Graff, the author of What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999), is a contributing editor for The American Prospect and Out magazine.