Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This quiz is part of the formal assessment for this grading period. You have 40 minutes to
answer both questions.
Source A – Michael Jacobsen, Ole Bruun - Human Rights and Asian Values:
Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representations in Asia (Curzon Press,
2005)
Human rights are both a crucial concern for and a rising challenge to national identities. Asian
values are clearly expressive of a growing need to explicitize [identify] own culture in the face
of rapidly modernizing and globalizing forces outside the control of national elites. At a very
general level, too, we can sense a crisis of values in many Asian societies as conventional
institutions such as kinship organization cease to play a dominant part in maintaining social
morality. Some Asian nations are perhaps rediscovering their cultural traditions—or
rediscovering a sense of self—to meet the challenges that their unique transformation to
industrial societies in recent decades has posed (...)The fact that the Asian criticism of
universal human rights has been put forward by a number of state leaders has added to our
sense of urgency. Today, states and systems are the prime enemies of human rights and by far
their most serious violators. When the state is both the spokesman on human rights and the
prime violator, its credibility in human rights debates must be scrutinized. Asian values were
envisioned as a counter-discourse to a perceived threat from the outside in the form of Western
human rights diplomacy as well as to counterbalance a massive internal push for greater
freedoms and protections.
Total: 12 points
Good luck!