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Bryan S. Turner

Auteur de The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology

47+ oeuvres 820 utilisateurs 2 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mellon Committee for the Study of Religion, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York and Director of the Institute for Religion Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne). He was afficher plus the Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wellesley College (2009-10). His most recent publications are Religion and Modern Society (Cambridge 2011) and The Religious and the Political (Cambridge 2013). With Oscar Salemink, he edited the Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia (2014). He is the founding editor with John O'Neill of the Journal of Classical Sociology (Sage) and with Irfan Ahmad the Journal of Religious and Political Practice (Routledge). He received the Max Planck Award in 2015 for research on secularization and modernity: social and religious pluralism, and is a Guest Professor at the University of Potsdam. afficher moins

Œuvres de Bryan S. Turner

The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (1984) 290 exemplaires
The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006) — Directeur de publication — 69 exemplaires
The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (1996) — Directeur de publication — 41 exemplaires
The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (1991) — Directeur de publication — 32 exemplaires
The Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980) 16 exemplaires
Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978) 15 exemplaires
Weber and Islam: A Critical Study (1974) 11 exemplaires
Classical Sociology (1999) 10 exemplaires
Status (1988) 9 exemplaires
Equality (Key Ideas) (1986) 9 exemplaires
Dominant Ideologies (1990) — Directeur de publication — 7 exemplaires
The Talcott Parsons Reader (Blackwell Readers) (1991) — Directeur de publication — 7 exemplaires
Globalization East and West (2010) 5 exemplaires
Early Sociology of Class (Making of Sociology) (7 Volume Set) (1998) — Contributeur — 3 exemplaires
Religion and the State: A Comparative Sociology (Key Issues in Modern Sociology) (2011) — Directeur de publication — 2 exemplaires
Citizenship (Critical Concepts) (1994) 2 exemplaires
Weber & Islam V 7 (2014) 1 exemplaire

Oeuvres associées

Foucault, Health and Medicine (1997) — Avant-propos — 20 exemplaires

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Date de naissance
1945
Sexe
male
Nationalité
UK (dual)
Australia (dual)
Professions
Professor of Sociology
Organisations
University of Cambridge

Membres

Critiques

Bryan S. Turner attempts in this book to establish a basis for the universality of human rights in vulnerability as the common ontological condition of humanity. Arguing against cultural relativism as epistemological disinterest and ethical detachment, Turner argues that sociologists ought to normatively about human rights, rather than simply descriptively. He then goes on to discuss a few kinds of rights in greater depth.

Lofty goals, which I appreciate, and an underlying argument that I wanted to agree with. However, Turner tries to do too much and fails to really support his arguments. His discussion of cultural relativism is dismissive and fails to engage with the issues that relativists struggle with.

Personally, I am an emotional universalist but an intellectual relativist: in that my instincts and emotions insist that there must be a thing called 'human rights' and some things that are just wrong, but the more I try to justify those feelings the more I realize that while most people would agree with those general statements, the particulars of what those rights should be or what, ultimately, is just wrong are defined differently in different places and different times. This is especially true since 'cultural rights,' that is the idea that people have a right to their culture, or put differently, that minority cultures in particular have a right to survive, are now recognized in international human rights documents. But the survival of cultures often is interpreted as requiring the curtailment of other rights of people (usually women) within those cultures. But I digress. The point is, that cultural relativism, far from being "ethical detachment" is in fact deeply ethically committed. It is committed to respecting other ways of thinking and being, to respecting the vast complexing of issues like rights and avoiding intellectual colonialism. Relativism can be taken to an extreme, and by focusing on those extreme examples Turner is able to dismiss relativistic arguments out of hand. But he doesn't actually address any the real concerns.

Ultimately, I think my emotions are right--that is that 'human rights' are meaningful and that there can be a universal standard for defining them. One of these days, I hope to convince my rational side. I had hoped Bryan Turner's book would help me do that. Alas, it could not.

I would be less offended by his dismissal of relativism if his argument was not Eurocentric in other ways. He writes "Colonialism, often considered to be an aspect of a civilizing mission to bring an Enlightenment culture to primitive cultures, and yet colonialism and slavery involved extraordinary brutality." (p.15) Colonialism and slavery did not "involve" brutality, they were inherently brutal by definition in part because of the condescension involved in the concept of a civilizing mission. You can't take the brutality away and still have colonialism left standing somehow more pure.

Like much of human rights discourse, he describes human rights violations as "out there" rather than within the 'civilized' West. Human rights violations, according to Turner, happen when states collapse. Thus he refers to Yugoslavia and Darfur and Cambodia as sites of human rights violations, particularly through war and ethnic cleansing. Clearly these are terrible human rights violations. But he fails to mention the fact that the United States has the highest per capita prison rate in the world, or the gross human rights violations committed by the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, except as an after thought in the last few pages of the book. He thus does not see human rights violations as things often committed by the state even when the state is powerful, stable, and democratic.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
TinuvielDancing | Jan 19, 2010 |
 
Signalé
DavidDonSco | Sep 16, 2007 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
47
Aussi par
2
Membres
820
Popularité
#31,114
Évaluation
½ 3.4
Critiques
2
ISBN
208
Langues
5

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