Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Cultural Sociology Of Human Rights, Mark D. Jacobs, Lester R. Kurtz

Lester R. Kurtz

These cases of China, Occupy, and Gandhi suggest the value of the sociology of culture for understanding human rights. Since human rights is a cultural construct, human rights issues are in-flected by the same set of semantic tensions as the culture concept itself. The sociology of culture thus recommends a method for studying human rights: to explicate--indeed, to weave into an exegetical deep structure--those various tensions. This helps to see beneath the distortions that power and other forms of domination introduce into the discourse of human rights, and to recognize the full multiplicity of interests and voices.