ABSTRACT
Do rights exist in cultures that do not identify them with that language? If the conditions for popular revolt, social movements, and revolution stem from a massive deprivation of rights, it follows that violence done to the integrity of the person and community provokes an acute consciousness of injustice and hence begets a countermovement in defense of injured rights. This view perceives the political struggle of the colonized and downtrodden as an inherent struggle for rights. Whether a movement happens in a culture with a system of rights couched in a formal vocabulary has little to do with this naturally intuited sense of rights. In their investigation of peasants’ understanding of rights, Chinese social scientists found that the peasants were unsure how to respond to questionnaires about the legal definitions of rights pertaining to their life, work, villages, and families. But when questioned about what cannot be taken away from them, even by the state, everyone knows for sure what these “rights” are: life, family, person, respect, and certain property. True, many peasants polled were illiterate or unaware that human rights may be imperfect (or a device conceived by and for the powerful), yet what could be more human than their apparently uneducated responses (Xia 2004: 29)?
