Taking advantage of what have been learned about “Japanese collectivism,” this chapter theoretically examines cultural stereotype, which is a simplified and distorted image of a culture. The cultural stereotype tends to create the following four basic illusions: uniformity (“The Japanese are all collectivists”), polarity (“The Japanese are collectivists, whereas the Americans are individualists”), determinacy (“Japanese culture causes Japanese collectivism”), and permanency (“Japanese collectivism is immutable”). Contrary to the illusions of uniformity and polarity, actual data typically show large individual difference within each group, and the distributions of individual difference typically have a large overlap between groups. Contrary to the illusion of determinacy, human behavior tends to be affected more strongly by situation than by culture. Contrary to the illusion of permanency, culture as well as human mind and behavior tends to change as a result of intellectual activity and situational change.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The third and fourth generations consisted of Franz Boas and his prime students, Alfred L. Kroeber and Edward Sapir, reflecting a distinctly Humboldtian perspective from the century’s turn through the years before World War II. Boas had still grown up in the Humboldtian tradition of Theodor Waitz, Adolf Bastian, and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, and had even consulted Heymann Steinthal. In the United States, Boas offered the first doctoral anthropology program at Columbia University, presenting linguistics in traditional Humboldtian terms and with Kroeber and Sapir as early beneficiaries. When joining Boas’ graduate program, Sapir already brought along Humboldtian notions from his undergraduate Germanic linguistics, eventually to lead to some theoretical differences with Boas about the interpretation of language change (with Kroeber frequently taking an intermediate position). All together, the Boasian program of anthropological linguistics however reflected closely Humboldt’s ideas a century ago, although Boasians did not advertise their historical link.

The introduction highlights the attraction of the idea of human rights. It affords insight into the development of the new international standards, considers the philosophical foundations, presents matters of cross-cultural interpretation, and broaches the subject of controversies. The controversies reveal the underlying tension between cultural relativism and universalism. By turning to difficult challenges, it is possible to come to grips with shared values or cross-cultural universals. The powerful idea of human rights appeals because of the peremptory norms, known as ius cogens, e.g., the rights against slavery and genocide.

Engineering is becoming increasingly globalized. We need to cultivate thinking about engineering in the broad international context. The current literature predominantly takes the Western perspective as its point of departure for discussions of engineering ethics in the international context. It focuses on technology transfer from Western to non-Western countries and the dilemmas of a conflicted Western engineer when working in non-Western countries. This chapter reviews two strategies for broadening this focus in the literature: globalizing and diversifying engineering ethics. Globalization focuses on establishing the commonalities between different countries. While it sounds intuitively compelling, it can be at the expense of newcomers in the engineering fields. Diversification focuses on acknowledging the cultural differences between countries, but it can easily be misinterpreted as ethical relativism. Diversification is most helpful if cross-cultural reflection can be achieved. If followed properly, both strategies can lead to more inclusive thinking in engineering ethics.

Mead and Bateson were two of the most famous and influential anthropologists whose research and advocacy have had broad influences on social sciences and mental health in the twentieth century. Although their marriage lasted only four years, they continued to influence each other until their dying days. After Mead’s death, their only daughter, Catherine Bateson, also an accomplished anthropologist, found out that Mead had been a closet lesbian since her early adulthood, and for years was a lover of another famous anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. These entangled relationships are described and discussed in the context of their achievements and contributions. Also included in the narratives are Mead’s original fieldwork in American Samoa and controversies surrounding Samoan teenagers’ sex life; Mead’s relationship with Benjamin Spock and their influences on contemporary child-rearing practices; Bateson’s complicated and tragic family background; and Bateson’s contributions to systems biology, double bind theory, and cybernetics.

This chapter investigates the sampling issue of the social sciences in the analysis of contemporary Japanese society, addressing the basic question of why some groups are overrepresented in its portrayal while others tend to be disregarded, despite its pluralistic realities. In doing so, it then identifies four models: monocultural, multiethnic, multiclass and multicultural. It also highlights three areas in which the particular case of Japan has something to offer to social science issues in general – the convergence debate, cultural relativism, and the distinction between ideologies and lived realities in the description of a given society – and demonstrates why it is necessary to be sensitive to two types of relativism: intrasocietal and intersocietal.

We challenge the idea that the human rights of women and the right to culture are in opposition. First, the ideas that all human beings have the same rights and that these rights cannot be selectively abridged are fundamental to a diversity of cultures – though they often co-exist with discriminatory ideas and practices. Second, the idea of opposition between women’s rights and cultural rights is grounded in the myth that cultures are homogenous, bounded, and static. All cultures include a diversity of values; cultures also constantly mix and evolve. Third, the idea of opposition between women’s rights and cultural rights overlooks the power dynamics that make it difficult for women to influence their culture. Fourth, contraposing women’s rights and cultural rights splits experiences of oppression and privilege by gender and culture, instead of recognizing their intersectionality. Finally, the selective use of arguments against the universality of human rights in women’s case reveals bias. The universality of human rights is not questioned when men’s rights are at stake. In conclusion, it is critical to recognize and resist oppressive interests and practices disguised under the cloak of culture. The universality-of-human-rights principle demands essential protections and freedoms for all human beings.

Due to persistent cultural contestation of rights, Chapter 2 elaborates upon the history and relationship between culture and human rights. It sketches the development of international human rights law from the 1940s to date, detailing the debates in that period regarding universality and cultural relativism. The chapter concludes that the debate is less dichotomous now, forging a middle path that acknowledges (to an extent) the importance of culture and its (not unlimited) accommodation in human rights. One mechanism by which human rights can accommodate cultural diversity is via domestic implementation. Therefore, Chapter 2 includes a detailed analysis of literature on culturally sensitive approaches to human rights implementation, which advocate embedding rights in local social institutions to secure their acceptance, protection and enjoyment. Chapter 2 argues that such approaches are crucial as they demonstrate principled respect for cultural diversity, as well as promoting the efficacy of implementation measures.

This chapter surveys the South African state’s engagement with the international normative languages which emerged after 1945. Its focus is on the sustained effort to reconfigure apartheid into a form compatible with the lexicon of human rights, self-determination, and multicultural pluralism. Beginning in the early 1960s, apartheid, rebadged “separate development,” was interlaced with norms on self-determination, identity, and economic development. Apartheid was reset in a form which deferred to the prevailing ideals of the period, an effort that was never convincing, but was, in broad terms, disturbingly coherent. Drawing on South African archives and underutilized public relations tracts, it demonstrates that National Party ideologues were conversant in the new internationalist phraseology. Their agility remains a powerful example of how discourses of human welfare and freedom hold ample capacity for subversion into authoritarian instrument. Apartheid, a project of essentialist, racially determined nationalism, could be, and was, translated into various emancipatory and internationalist dialects.

Human rights are a mixed bag, and populist antipathy towards human rights is not spread evenly across its contents. The idea of a human right as such is too abstract to be sustained as an object of political suspicion. Usually it is some subset of human rights or some particular aspect of human rights practice that excites critical attention from populist politicians and the citizens who support them. The subset of rights that I want to concentrate on I will call “Rule-of-Law rights.” By that I mean the cluster of rights in each of the main human rights instruments that protect Rule-of-Law values, particularly procedural values.