Human Rights in a Prehuman World: Performative Restructurings of Human Rights in the Brokpa's Songs and Dances

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How we can think of a conceptual shift in both the logic and praxis of human rights law by considering certainperformative expressions of human rights precepts, is the question I wish to explore via my PhD. This project intends toconduct ethnographic fieldwork with the Brokpa community in Ladakh, India. Over the last ten years, their folk songs anddances have incorporated concrete human rights precepts due to certain sociological reasons. This, I argue, is anembodied conception of rights that is similar to juridical and legal iterations in form and substance. The vocabulary ofhuman rights takes the form of a self-referential index for the community to project and relate to their socio-economicwoes through a morally authoritative register. Their way of claiming rights performatively creates a spectacle ofotherness and exoticisation that distinguishes them to the civil society and the state as pre-modern survivors ofcapitalism. Human rights workers and bureaucrats then themselves translate these claims into a legal template tochannelise developmental projects and global funds into Borkpa villages, resulting in a substantive configuration of rightsand obligations that might otherwise be available in law. This cultural production of rights, not grounded in civic politics orthe individualism of human dignity, offers a different foundation and modality of human rights law as a situated,contingent universal that is nonetheless produced locally.