Exam 15: What Can Anthropology Tell Us About Social Inequality

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The culture of human rights that appears to have emerged in recent years. As in the cultures traditionally studied by anthropologists, the culture of human rights is based on certain ideas about human beings, their needs, and their ability to exercise agency, as well as the kinds of social connections between human beings that are considered legitimate and illegitimate. The entire question of "legitimacy" in human rights discourse points to the central role played by law, both as a way of articulating specific human rights and as a tool for defending those rights. After that time, however, political asylum-seekers were increasingly lumped together with victims of earthquakes and tsunamis and addressed by a new form of governmentality, which Fassin calls humanitarianism, "a mode of governing that concerns the victims of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and exile, as well as disasters, famines, epidemics and wars-in short, every situation characterized by precariousness" (x).

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The stratification system of India has been taken as the prototype of caste stratification, although anthropologists also have applied the concept to social hierarchies encountered elsewhere in the world. Local caste divisions (jatis) in village India adhere to rules of purity and pollution defined in terms of the occupations their members perform and the foods they eat and which govern whom they may marry. Prejudice against Roma-widely known as "Gypsies" and long among Europe's most oppressed minority groups-has swelled into a wave of violence. Over the past year, at least seven Roma have been killed in Hungary, and Roma leaders have counted some 30 Molotov cocktail attacks against Roma homes, often accompanied by sprays of gunfire.

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The principle of descent has also played a central role in the identification and persistence of race, ethnicity, and nation. As noted above, these three categories are all closely bound up with historical developments over the past 500 years that built the modern world. Indeed, these categories are particularly significant in nation-states, and many contemporary nation-states are of very recent, postcolonial origin. Clearly, to make sense of contemporary postcolonial forms of social stratification, we also need to look more closely at the categories of race and ethnicity.