Friday night saw the third in a series of three cultural shows at Town Hall in Jodhpur. Each reflected a different region of India. We were unable to attend on Thursday because of another wedding, this time of one of the (now former) members of the NLU faculty, Aparajita Bhatt. The performers at Friday night’s show were from Jaisalmer, the city we had visited a month earlier and where we spent a night in the desert. They are the descendents of a tribe that converted to Islam four centuries ago but continued to serve as entertainers in the court of the Hindu princes of Jaisalmer. The three-hour show was great and attendance was SRO.
On Monday afternoon we were joined at NLU House by Vincenzo Ferrari, president of the law faculty of the University of Milan. Vincenzo is a noted scholar in the field of law and sociology and is in India for a short lecture tour. He spoke at NLU Tuesday morning on human rights from a sociological perspective and expressed a concern that I share: The ever-continuing diffusion and specification of sundry human “rights” may have the unintended consequence of discrediting the whole project. He also characterized the distinctions between first, second, and third-generation human rights in terms of a pendulum swinging between the poles of individualism and communitarianism. I’ll leave it to others to consider the aptness of his metaphor. At tea after his lecture Vincenzo expressed appreciation for the work of Harold Berman in response to a question I raised about alternatives to the dominant Enlightenment-based human rights narrative. He nonetheless maintained that the modern human rights project is grounded in the Enlightenment, particularly in its demand that all authority structures justify themselves daily before the court of popular sovereignty. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to address whether such an understanding itself may be the fuse that leads to the detonation of the human rights project. Too bad Nick Wolterstorff wasn’t here.
24 February 2009
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