Recognition, culture, representation: A qualified ethnographic legitimation of human rights

Much as the scholarship on human rights has engaged with a diverse range of social, political and cultural themes, there is still a great deal to be said about how marginalized struggles develop everyday representations and ephemeral civic idioms contra dominant institutions. Extending this unexplored line of enquiry, I advance a minor communicative theory of human rights, arguing that its future lies in its broader representational function in civil society. By positing my ethnographic learnings from the Brokpa people of Ladakh within a working theory of recognition, I foreground how their political praxes mobilize a vernacular lexis of human rights to sabotage statist and institutional monopolies over legal enunciations. Such idiomatic claims help experiences of injustice transcend the procedural, formalistic obstacles of state and international law. When discursively asserted, they provoke the addressee to recognize the underlying contention as a social truth, not just a political or legal ploy. At the same time, in order to create a civic space independent of statist and other institutional hegemonies, these assertions need to maintain distance from state law and other international vestiges while retaining their inseparability from the larger human rights discourse as a latent thought. I term this cognition, with a nod to Adorno, non-identity thinking. In sum, recognition and non-identity thinking provide two theoretical motifs to investigate communicative praxes of human rights beyond the Brokpa people's struggles, without being mired in vernacularization, civic activism, rule of law, legal transplants, relativistic fetishism, universalist reification and other conceptual themes that prevail in our extant scholarly catalogue.