A Comparative Anthropology of Conscience, Ethics and Human Rights

Project Information

AnCon

Grant agreement ID: 648477

DOI

10.3030/648477

Project closed

EC signature date 20 July 2015

Start date 1 August 2015

End date 31 January 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 457 869,00

EU contribution

€ 1 457 869,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AnCon (A Comparative Anthropology of Conscience, Ethics and Human Rights)

Reporting period: 2020-02-01 to 2021-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This research project was a comparative anthropology of conscience. It examined conscience as a culturally and historically embedded ethical category, whose precise meanings are always the product of particular conflicts. In doing so, it asked what is conscience and how do we know it when we see it? And what happens when the concept, often associated with a distinct Christian or liberal history, travels across cultural boundaries?

The issue of freedom of conscience is of immense global significance. Recent politics has been marked by disputes over the limits of tolerance, and the extent to which people’s convictions should be protected. The invocation of conscience can capture a form of conviction that cannot necessarily be reduced to the religious, potentially involving a wider and more varied form of thought, affect or action. Academic focus has tended to be on freedom of religion, and the analysis of conscience that does exist is largely doctrinal or philosophical, setting out in great detail and sophistication why conscience is so important, and how it should be defined. However, if we are to understand the restraints and possibilities involved in attempts to protect conscience, it is important to examine how and why such claims are made, and under which conditions they are successful or not. What counts as a persuasive claim of conscience can be inflected with cultural understandings of what constitutes good character, mutual obligation and moral agency, amongst other things, rather than given once and for all.
The overall objectives of the research were to:
A. To explore the ‘cultures of conscience’ - the networks, artefacts, and discourses that provide the conditions of possibility for people to make persuasive claims about conscience.
B. To explore how claims of conscience are transformed through the encounter with human rights norms and institutions.

Case Study 1 explored the experiences of the over sixty thousand other British citizens, who refused to take up arms in the Second World War. Case Study 2 examined activists who followed their conscience and resisted the politics of ethnic division that has marked modern Sri Lankan history. Case Study 3 examined memory activists who emerged in the wake of prisoners of conscience, and other forms of Stalinist violence. Case Study 4 examined the role of claims of conscience in the international human rights movement.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research team have held regular face to face meetings for those in Edinburgh, and via email and skype for those based elsewhere, to ensure the integration of work priorities. Prior to COVID we were also able to hold face to face meetings for all the team in the UK and Sri Lanka. We also used shared Outlook Onedrive folder and Nvivo projects in order to effectively share and analyse data. COVID-19 restrictions in the last year of the project restricted face to face meetings, research and the collaborative way we had been writing, resulting in some delays and changes.

The team made considerable progress over the project. Background literature was analysed and gaps identified. We identified key sources, carrying out interviews and conducted archival research for all four case studies, as well as carried out considerable amounts of writing, publication and dissemination, including organising an international conference on the Intimate Life of Dissent. Archives have been consulted, oral history interviews carried out and ethnography undertaken in the UK, the US, Russia and Sri Lanka.

Case Study 1 on Britain showed the relationship between claims of conscience and the history of debates about freedom in the middle of the 20th century, showing the limits and potentials within particular attempts to protect freedom of conscience and their legacies for human rights and humanitarianism.

Case Study 2 on Sri Lanka explored the ways in which conviction and conscience were woven through the work of dissident activists. Through ethnography and oral history interviews in Sri Lanka and the wider Diaspora, we asked why did some people, rather than others, feel the need to take a stand against the violent political forces sweeping through their communities?

Case Study 3 on Russia examined the legacy of prisoners of conscience, dissidents and the materialisation of memory. After tracing the genealogy of freedom of conscience, we focused on the ways in which post- Soviet Russian memory activists engage in archival research and collect diaries and documents from relatives of the Soviet political prisoners, providing a way for claims of conscience and the condemnation of unconscionable acts to be made public.

Case Study 4 on human rights showed how the significance of conscience was also hardwired into Amnesty International’s original mission, yet, over the following sixty years, much of the international human rights movement appears to have become significantly less interested in the issue.

We held 4 workshops and conferences, produced an edited book and 2 essay collections, wrote 14 journal articles and book chapters, produced another 12 papers, wrote three monographs, gave 57 conference, seminar and other presentations, held a major public exhibition and curated an extensive digitised online archive of artefacts of conscience, in addition to other blog posts, and media outputs. We have presented our findings to nearly 2000 academics, 150 members of civil society and over 700,000 members of the general public.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The overall project was ground breaking, employing novel methods and analytical insights, in order to producing the first comparative analysis of the cultural and political salience of claims of conscience. The research contributed to transforming our understandings of the limits and potentials of attempts to protect freedom of conscience. This research has shown how conscience is culturally and historically embedded ethical category, whose precise meanings are always the product of particular conflicts, and often run through the most intimate relations. We have also shown how conscience can also run through other normative and social forms, such as civility and futility in unexpected ways.

Methodologically, the project has developed different techniques to social science investigation of claims of conscience. Questions of conscience have usually been examined by philosophers or theologians, but this project has shown the importance of playing attention to the cultures of conscience through which conscience is made meaningful, tangible and given a public presence. We developed a range of methodologies in order to illuminate and understand these cultural artefacts of conscience. This also meant placing these artefacts back into the broader social and cultural history within which they are understood. We have used techniques drawn from anthropology, history and the creative arts, including ethnography, oral history interviews, the analysis of documents and other forms of material culture, as well forms of artistic engagement. We have also brought together social science, creative arts and curatorial science, developing ways in which we both understand and interpret the ways in which conscience is given a tangible and material form, and ways in which we represent and disseminate findings in relation cultures and conscience.

Front Cover of Intimate Life of Dissent