Rights, Cultures, Subjects and Citizens

Susanne Brandtstädter · Peter Wade · Kath Woodward

Sep 2013 · Routledge

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This book questions the political logic of foregrounding cultural collectives in a world shaped by globalization and neoliberalization. Throughout the world, it is no longer only individuals, but increasingly collective "cultures" who are made responsible for their own regulation, welfare and enterprise. This appears as a surprising shift from the tenets of classical liberalism which defined the ideal subject of politics as the "unencumbered self"- the free, equal and self-governing individual.

The increasing promotion and recognition of cultural rights in international legislation, multiculturalism, and public debates on "culture" as a political problem more generally indicate that culture has become a more central terrain for governance and struggles around rights and citizenship. On the basis of case studies from China, Latin America, and North America, the contributors of this book explore the links between culture, civility, and the politics of citizenship. They argue that official reifications of "culture" in relation to citizenship, and even the recognition of cultural rights, may obey strategies of governance and control, but that citizens may still use new cultural rights and networks, and the legal mechanisms that have been created to protect them, in order to pursue their own agendas of empowerment.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Economy and Society.

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Susanne Brandtstädter is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research in China has focussed on gender and social relatedness, moral economies, modernity and peasant subjectivities, legal knowledge, notions of justice, social and political rights, and local responses to global capitalism. Previous publications include Chinese Kinship. New Anthropological Perspectives (2009).

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. He works on race and ethnicity - and their articulations with gender - in Latin America and on ideas of race, nature and culture generally. His recent work is on race and genomic science in Latin America. Previous publications include Race and Sex in Latin America (2009).

Kath Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK. She works on works on diversity, mobilities and inequalities, especially in relation to sex gender and embodied practices and the relationship between virtual and material forms of inequality, most recently in the field of sport. Previous publications include Planet Sport (2012).