Form of Life, Buddhism, and Human Rights

Stanley Cavell took up anthropological works for consideration in a way that we might characterize as staccato, and has informed anthropological work in increasing and increasingly sustained ways. As these works show, it is difficult to lift, so to speak, a single concept—say, the ordinary—out of Cavell’s work, and treat it as if it were discrete, unentangled with neighboring concepts like language, or the uncanny, or nextness, to suggest only a few candidates. Still, what I will do here is highlight the fertility of Cavell’s elaboration on Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ for my ethnographic work on human rights in Thailand. I set out to show that were we to attend only to the register of cultural forms (more or less specifiable sets of customs, traditions, norms, values, habituated practices), as human rights debates that hew to cultural relativisim or ‘Asian values’ do, we would develop a partial view of how human rights emerged in the progressive, democratic moment surrounding and following the 1997 Thai constitution. More narrowly, the case I make, the case that one cannot make if one only takes form of life in the conventional sense of describing only social conventions, is that a central line of thought in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand about what human rights were turned not on the nature of rights, but on a picture of the human. The picture at issue was one importantly inscribed within a certain, controversial school of Buddhist thinking. This paper will examine specific contests within Buddhism over what a human being is, with the particular claims to rights that flow from different pictures of the human. That is, it will take these debates, as they appeared in struggles over human rights, as pitching irreconcilable notions of the human form of life against one another. First, though, it is necessary to provide some orientation for readers unfamiliar with Thailand.