49. Minority Rights, Culture, and Anthropology 

Convenors:

Reetta Toivanen, Humboldt University, Berlin

Reetta.toivanen@abo.fi

Reetta.toivanen@staff.hu-berlin.de

 

Levent Soysal, Kadir Has University, Istanbul

levsoy@khas.edu.tr

 

Discussants:

Jane Cowan, University of Sussex, Brighton

j.cowan@sussex.ac.uk

 

Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, University of Bielefeld

joanna.pfaff@uni-bielefeld.de

 

What is the place of social anthropology in the field of anti-discrimination law and minority rights? Such concepts as culture, tradition, ethnicity, nation or race are core concepts of anthropological thinking and analysis. Simultaneously, they play an important role in international legislation on human rights, especially when lawyers deal with minority right issues. Thus, jurisprudence may legally entitle peoples to their cultures or may deny them the corresponding rights. As the concepts used in the courtrooms are never of a neutral origin, social anthropologists are increasingly paying attention to the problems related to "struggles over cultural rights". How can anthropology help us to engage and rethink the powerful of frameworks of human rights and to take the concept of equality seriously, as well as reconsidering its own core analytical constructs in the process? Until 29 July 2003 all EU member states should have adopted a new EU anti-discrimination directive ("race-directive") into their national legislations. While most of the states certainly had tried hard to meet the requirements in time, a great number of them still failed. The arguments used by state representatives and NGO-activists reveal a lot about European societies, as both old and new EU members make a rather tactical use of the transposition. The workshop aims to take the "race-directive" and recent case law produced by the European Court of Human Rights as an empirical basis for conceptual and theoretical discussions. We encourage potential contributors to submit paper proposals (no longer that 250 words), tackling with questions of minority rights, anti-racism, and anti-discrimination and initiating an in-depth debate on the use of the above mentioned "core concepts" of anthropology and their possible consequences as they relate to the field of human rights and its practice today in the world and in particular in Europe.

 

Immigrant Transnational Legal Spaces: Citizenship, Family Code and Cultural Justice

Ayse Caglar, Central European University, Budapest

caglara@ceu.hu

Anti-Discrimination and Discourse about Migrants in Europe

Prasad Reddy, Free University of Berlin

anip@sirecontact.de

Old and New Anthropological Concepts in Normative Minority Rights Literature and Nongovernmental Organizations' Practice

Alina-Petronela Silian, Central European University, Budapest

sphsia01@phd.ceu.hu

Reinforcing Boundaries: The Future of the Roma in Romania's Transition to the European Union

Christine Boyd, American University, Washington DC

chbst29@aol.com

The Census as an Element of Ethnic Discourse in Poland

Katarzyna Warminska, Jagiellonian University, Krakow

warminsk@sigma.wsmip.uj.edu.pl

Are Language Rights Human Rights?

Jackie Urla, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

jurla@anthro.umass.edu

Indigenous law as State Law - Recent Trends in Latin American Legal Pluralism

Wolfgang Gabbert, University of Hannover

w.gabbert@ish.uni-hannover.de

Israeli Anthropology and Apartheid: Intellectual Property, Mizrahi Politics, and the Right of Return

Smadar Lavie, Tel Aviv

sinaia5@netvision.net.il