Human rights as a claim for recognition: Towards an ecumenical anthropology of dignity and personhood

The drive for recognition, I argue here, is a normative claim inherent in the many polysemic uses of human rights around the world. By critically re-reading Axel Honneth's theory of recognition with the anthropological literature on human rights, I wish to observe how conceptions of universal dignity and personhood are present in culturally situated struggles for political participation. This is neither the vernacularisation of canonical liberal ideas nor their careless strategic deployment in local contexts. On the other hand, actors on the margins speak the idiom of human rights to produce a contingent sense of self that is nevertheless universal in its ambition. In line with Honneth, I divide the ethnographic cases I consider into the institutional spheres of love, legality and solidarity to imagine three qualitatively different praxes of recognition. It is time to move beyond the dated universalism-versus-relativism debate. By shifting the focus to recognition, I hope to design an alternative theoretical scaffolding of human rights that makes sense of why the disenfranchised still use it, wherever and whenever they do, despite its persistent failures.