The phenomenology of human rights at 35,000 feet …*
BY MARK GOODALE
It is unsettling how an experience can rapidly shift from the incongruous to the profoundly moving, from a moment of surprise to the realization that one’s frame of reference, which has been put in place only with great difficulty, is no longer quite so adequate. So there I was, halfway through a whirlwind sequence of lectures at European universities that was supposed to give many of the ideas in this book one final critical public airing before they were forever committed to the permanence of print. I found myself standing in line waiting to board a small regional jet in one of the outer terminals at Heathrow. My fellow passengers bound for Copenhagen looked to be mainly business travelers; already busy working their cell phones in several languages, they were oblivious to the world around them. Ever the anthropologist, I couldn’t help but observe this sleepy early-morning ritual, marked as it was by its sheer mundaneness and rational efficiencies.
My hosts had sent me off the night before with a typically generous despedida. I was not exactly worse for the wear, but as I stood there waiting to hand my e-ticket to the Lufthansa agent, it occurred to me that the demands of daily early-morning international travel stood in some tension with the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the academic life.
Suddenly the eerie quiet and sense of routine anticipation in that outer terminal at Heathrow were jolted by a din: from around the corner, still out of sight, came a multitudinous jumble of voices of the kind that is usually attached to a throng of people. This urgent sound snaked around the curved wall and hit the waiting masters of the universe like a thunderbolt. Cell phones dropped from ears to well-clothed sides, and all heads turned with a collective gasp in the direction of a sound that we could now hear clearly included the crying and insistent pleas of very small children.
There was also something else, at least for me. As an ethnographer I have come to rely on all of my senses during what I can describe without too much irony as data collection. Indeed, early-modern scientific epistemologists like David Hume would have had no difficulty understanding how the complicated process of ethnographic observation demands the focused application of touch as much as sight, smell as much as sound. So as I waited to greet the incongruous in what would be a matter of seconds, my sense of smell was confronted with the odors of dust, the countryside, and, above all, fear.
From around the corner came a long line of African men, women, and especially children: older children carrying younger children, younger children holding crying babies. I estimated the group to be at least forty people. They walked right past us and boarded the plane. Their leader, a middle-aged woman with reading glasses around her neck, handed a packet of papers to the gate agent, but no tickets were scanned. The Lufthansa attendants simply stood aside to allow the clearly exhausted and bedraggled group to pass.
The one-hour flight was filled with screams, crying, shouts, unanticipated movements in the aisle, and, for me, the sudden realization that all of my critical engagements with human rights, my analytical desires, even my emerging ethical commitments, must be bracketed in ways that paradoxically underscore their tentativeness at the same time their urgency is reinforced.
It was my good fortune to sit among the group of Africans and even more to sit next to their leader. I learned from her that they were precisely forty- three—to approximate here would be obscene—refugees from camps in Zambia who had been granted the extraordinarily rare opportunity to resettle in the Human Development Index–topping social democracies of Western Europe. They were primarily Congolese, and I later learned that the current nationalist and conservative government of Denmark—which has maintained its power primarily on a not so subtly racist anti-immigration platform—only agrees to accept refugees from Africa whose vulnerability and victimization have been so clearly established that not even the high priests of Danishness in the Dansk Folkeparti can resist extending to them the hand of charity.
Yet this also meant that my worst imaginings in that moment—different from theirs but no less acute—were realized: the old man with the sad eyes sitting across the aisle, these small children at my feet who looked up at me with a mixture of terror and fascination on what was surely the second airplane ride of their lives (the first being the one that brought them from Lusaka to London), and that young teenage girl who patrolled her siblings from time to time with a stern look that told me she was probably now the head of her family on this journey had all just emerged from a maelstrom of human suffering. Had that old man been forced to watch while his sons were massacred and his daughters were taken away to be brutalized? Were these children at my feet war orphans, their parents among the hundreds of thousands of victims of the DRC’s multiple paroxysms? And the proud teenage girl . . . I could not bring myself to look her in the eye and imagine her trauma. And yet there she was, a survivor, the pure embodiment of human dignity, with her whole uncertain life ahead of her. Perhaps, I thought, someday she will find a way to leave the ghost of King Leopold behind.
As the plane descended over the waters off the coast of Copenhagen, which are filled with a phalanx of ecologically progressive wind turbines, the critic in me forced his way to the surface, if only for a brief and unwanted moment. I knew enough about the contradictions and hypocrisies of contemporary Western Europe to know what likely lay ahead for the refugees. Their years will be filled with struggles over language, employment, culture shock, and, for the adults, nostalgia for life in their equatorial homeland. But the children, like children everywhere, will adapt rapidly. They will enter a neighborhood public school in one of Copenhagen’s immigrant districts, they will quickly learn a fluent and colloquial Danish, and they will grow up with all the protections and benefits to be found in a modern EU nation-state. They will always be hybrid Europeans, never quite accepted by some, but their life chances will be relatively expansive and they will never again cower in terror in an isolated village while rebel soldiers come for their parents, their aunts, their sisters. . . .
Even though I continued on to the next lecture, the next chance to describe what it means to consider human rights in an anthropological key, the encounter with those survivors—those human beings whose normative value is precisely equal to that of the pilots who flew them to safety, to mine, to the rebel soldiers roaming at the very moment through the forests of eastern Congo, to the president of the Finnish university where I would soon appear, to the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize (who also happens to be Finnish), to everyone who has and will ever live in the world—washed over me like a great existential wave. This is the phenomenology of human rights, that experiential dimension that lies well outside the boundaries of both the conceptual and the practical, all those intellectual puzzles that never-endingly fascinate scholars of human rights and all those bureaucratic and institutional challenges that occupy the energies of the legions of officials whose job it is to actualize the different facets of the international human rights system.
Everything that is to follow here must be read retrospectively in terms of this phenomenology. We must be brave in our critical engagements with the neo-Kantian aspirations of the postwar human rights project. But I, for one, will never forget that proud, beautiful, frightened Congolese teenager who had to flee her home with a world on her shoulders. It is for her, in the end, that this book was written.
Mark Goodale is Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
* This article is an excerpt of Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights published in 2009 by Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, and has been reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Any reproduction or distribution, by any means, of this material is prohibited without the prior written permission of the publisher.
