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This chapter introduces the main problem of the book: the tensions that exist between cultural rights, and accommodation and formal protection for sexual equality in liberal constitutional democracies. It also discusses the unsatisfactory treatment of this problem within much recent mainstream political philosophy, especially liberal theories of multiculturalism and deliberative democracy theory.

In this concluding chapter, the main arguments of the book are briefly recapped and extended. Democratic legitimacy is defended as a core norm for plural, liberal democratic societies, one which should also guide deliberations about contested cultural practices. This chapter also makes the case for expanding the scope of what we understand as (legitimating) democratic activity, so as to include not only formal, institutionalized democratic practices and spaces, but also informal, everyday expressions of democratic agency. Such a shift should enable us to better see and foster women’s capacities and opportunities to resist, affirm, transform, and reinvent their cultural traditions and arrangements, which speak directly to the issue of the legitimacy of those traditions.

Having argued, in Ch. 2, that there are universal moral values, the next logical step is to ask what these universal moral values are; this question is pursued in Chs 3 and 4, which consider arguments for two different types of universal value and link together to provide an analysis of what universal principles of justice should apply at the global level. This chapter examines claims that there are universal principles of civil and political justice, that is, those principles that specify what rights people have to what freedoms, and argues for universal human rights to certain civil and political liberties. It is arranged in 13 sections: Section I presents an analysis of human rights, since this term plays a central and important role in a plausible account of civil and political justice; Section II puts forward a general thesis about justifications for civil and political human rights; this is followed, in Sections III–VII, by an analysis of four cosmopolitan arguments for human rights that criticizes three of them but defends the fourth; Section VIII considers an alternative non-cosmopolitan approach to defending civil and political human rights, presented by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples (1999b); the next three sections (IX–XI) of the chapter explore misgivings about civil and political human rights, including the objections that such human rights are a species of imperialism and do not accord sufficient respect to cultural practices (IX), produce homogeneity/uniformity (X), and generate egoism/individualism and destroy community (XI); Section XII considers a further objection—the realist charges that foreign policy to protect civil and political human rights is in practice selective and partial and a cloak for the pursuit of the national interest. Section XIII summarizes the overall case made for civil and political justice.

This book examines the ways in which cultural practices that human communities have constructed have crossed the boundaries of place throughout history, disrupting social and cultural relations and keeping even spatially rooted cultures in motion. It consists of a collection of essays that offer stories of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. They chronicle histories of cultural motion where nothing stays the same, whether dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, practices of charity, feminist aspirations, medical techniques, sewing machines, or labor networks. The book explores how cultural practices moved across articulated space and relationships of power, creating the need for translation and the possibilities of radical misunderstandings. This introduction discusses how studies of empire and globalization have been the principal sources of the analytical language with which historians have undertaken to describe what happens wherever cultural practices intersect. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter concludes the book by asking to what extent the lessons learned from our study of language rights might also have implications for the notion of cultural rights in general. The broader notion of cultural rights is intended, like language rights, as a form of protection in a globalizing world where the pace of cultural change has accelerated as different societies become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. Here, the chapter suggests that if the notion of rights is to be of use in a culturally complex world, it needs to be returned to a basic understanding of the protection afforded to each individual on the basis of their ‘universal personhood’ (Maher 2002: 21).

This book concludes with two afterwords, the first of which argues how centering itinerancy as concept and method enables a reconsideration of scale in the historian's craft. It emphasizes the book's focus on itinerant matter and cultural practices, from music and musicians to body movements, pidgin, gift-giving, and aluminum, that traverse vast spaces—oceans, regions—or centuries, or both at the same time. The second afterword draws on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann to reflect on the culture concept itself and the ways in which it needs to be implicated in the moving practices explored by the book. It also considers how cultural processes extending backward past European modernity raises new questions about the history of how the modern concept of culture was itself established in Europe.

This chapter presents Bevir and Rhodes's theory of the state, and highlights its distinct and distinctive features. Their approach differs significantly from the ideational and interpretive approaches found respectively within the new institutionalism and discourse theory. In particular, we defend a historical approach to meaning as situated agency, explicitly opposing structural concepts of signifiers and regimes. From this perspective, the state appears as a differentiated cultural practice composed of all kinds of contingent and shifting beliefs and actions, where these beliefs and actions can be explained through a historical understanding. We then provide the set of aggregate concepts appropriate to historical studies of the state; situated agency, beliefs, practice, power, narrative, tradition, and dilemma.

Differences in cultural practices at the behavioral level are obvious. How families are constituted, who sleeps by whom, what people eat, what work they do, their child-rearing practices, all vary from culture to culture. Much of the early literature on diversity focused on difference at this behavioral level. Differences in meanings, ideals, and values, which are enacted in cultural practices, are more subtle and complex. For clinicians, questions about the impact of difference at both the behavioral and the symbolic level on the intrapsychic world of the individual are most complex and most relevant. How do differences in cultural practices and meanings shape the intrapsychic world of the individual? How are the individual's affects, cognition, and experience of self and other shaped by culture? How profound are the differences? Are there areas where cultural differences do not make a difference? Though these questions are relatively new to the human services, they have been central to the discipline of anthropology since the 1920s. Within anthropology, the conversation about similarity and difference across cultures is framed in terms of “universalism” and “cultural relativism.” For more than 80 years, proponents of “universalist” and “relativist” perspectives in anthropology have been engaged in a lively debate about their relative merits. In the hope that clinicians can build on the knowledge generated by this ongoing debate, this chapter reviews the history of these ideas in anthropology, explores the current state of this debate, and then discusses the implications for clinical practice.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes. The book has attempted to show that the distinction between rationality and irrationality in the Western tradition cannot be easily maintained. It starts with a narrow, unadorned conception of rationality in the context of coordination problems and shows that the common knowledge required is substantially related to issues of intersubjectivity, collective consciousness, and group identity. It starts with isolated individuals facing real, practical problems of coordination and shows that transcending the “transmission” view of communication (first-order knowledge) and including the “ritual” view (common knowledge) is exactly what is required. By associating common knowledge with cultural practices, this book suggests a close and reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture, which are often thought separate or even antagonistic.

This chapter focuses on “itineraries of matter,” or objects as traveling carriers of cultural practices and meanings, in the early modern world. It examines the role of red in the transmission of knowledge back and forth among European vernacular practitioners and text-oriented scholars in their production and reproduction of knowledge about natural things. To this end, the chapter takes us to the heat and dangers of vermillion production in early modern Europe: the hours of firing, stirring, stoking, hammering, chemical manipulation, and anxious waiting that produced the red pigments highly valued by painters and illuminators to bring blood to life. Vermillion production was dangerous and exacting, and yet its underlying techniques traveled rapidly across early modern Europe (and beyond) together with the webs of interlinked homologies—an entourage of lizards, blood, gold, alchemical formulas, and vernacular knowledge—which formed the foundations of early modern science.

This chapter traces the evolution of human civilization from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to the advent of agriculture and its large-scale impacts on the world. It describes this history in three ages of adaptive evolution. First, there was the age in which biological evolution dominated, in which we adapted to the circumstances of life in a manner no different from every other creature. Second came the age when gene–culture coevolution was in the ascendency. Through cultural activities, our ancestors set challenges to which they adapted biologically. In doing so, they released the brake that the relatively slow rate of independent environmental change imposes on other species. The results are higher rates of morphological evolution in humans compared to other mammals, with human genetic evolution reported as accelerating more than a hundredfold over the last 40,000 years. Now we live in the third age, where cultural evolution dominates. Cultural practices provide humanity with adaptive challenges, but these are then solved through further cultural activity, before biological evolution gets moving.

International law imposes an obligation on States to abolish traditional practices harmful to health. This chapter seeks to examine the nature of this obligation, the types of practices to be abolished and the measures required of States to achieve this end. It argues that the prejudice of a particular practice to health cannot be reduced to a simple bio-medical assessment and the broader psycho-social impacts and significance of a practice must be taken into account. It also identifies evidence of a cultural and gender bias in the identification of practices deemed harmful to health in the work of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Finally, the practice of female genital cutting is used to demonstrate that rather than adopt a simple legislative regime based on zero tolerance, a multifaceted approach, which is generated through dialogue with the communities that tolerate harmful practices, must be adopted if the effective elimination of harmful practices is to be achieved.

This chapter discusses the way song fragments function in the work of four novelists: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Christina Stead, and Charles Dickens. It considers silencing, particularly of women, as an aspect of fragmentation. It shows that women have long been associated with silence, despite having a cultural stereotype of garrulousness. The chapter also determines that intertexts empower the reader due to the ‘multi-accentuality’ of cultural texts and practices.

This chapter aims to interrogate the nature and role of the musical arts of singing and dancing in culture to explore the impact on both the quality of life and wellbeing. The chapter is divided into three primary sections, beginning with a discussion of music and its embodied communicative function, with evidence from infancy and early childhood research. The second section considers how musical arts are experienced in Western contexts, especially in terms of their contemporary use. The final section introduces the musical culture of the Venda of South Africa, showing how musicality is defined there in a culturally-specific manner. Through current research and the historical work of John Blacking, the final section explores how musicality is constructed within and beyond communities. The cross-cultural analysis allows for the examination of distinct notions of embodied musical communication whilst building on developments that support the idea of musicality and its role in enhancing quality of life and feelings of wellbeing.

This chapter examines key concepts for understanding the role of culture in human development, with examples from the life of a Guatemalan Mayan midwife. Rather than equating culture with static categories of ethnicity and race, we can focus on cultural practices—how communities of people live. Cultural practices fit together in dynamic patterns, such as the shifting patterns of cultural practices central to US and Mayan childhoods across centuries. These patterns have many interrelated features, including family occupations, fertility and infant mortality, family size, children's contributions to family work, involvement in Western schooling and associated practices, and ways of helping children learn. A focus on people's participation in the practices of their communities reveals the role of culture in human development.