The field of legal anthropology continues to produce innovative research on the relationships between local legal subjectivities and global institutional discourse on current social problems. In this book, Sally Merry traces the construction and implementation of the concept of “human rights” in the context of violence against women. Merry is as much interested in understanding the mechanics of the process as she is in discovering to what degree the idea of human rights has taken hold and is used at the grassroots level. To achieve these goals, she undertakes “deterritorialized ethnography,” combining direct observations of UN committee meetings and international conferences with interviews of local and international activists and long- and short-term fieldwork among women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Fiji, China, India, Hong Kong, and the United States (p. 29). This creative methodology yields a set of interesting findings concerning the impact of human-rights discourse on local responses to violence against women as well as anthropology’s role in promoting a more nuanced definition of culture among all the stakeholders involved in defending women’s rights.

Merry opens her query with the production of rights discourses at the United Nations. Although this meticulous task is directed by the goal to reach consensus among member states, it is far from a conversation among equals. There are coalitions and blocs (usually uniting wealthier northern states), members whose governments refuse to ratify outcomes (among these, not surprisingly, is the United States), and an impressive and growing array of NGO activists who contribute by lobbying official government participants. Despite the slow grind of debate required of consensus making, the results have been an actually impressive set of institutionalized agreements and conventions that, although they lack a formal enforcement body, are still quite useful tools to promote and, in some cases, produce legal reform and social change. In the case of women’s rights, the core document is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). As with other conventions, CEDAW calls for the United Nations to monitor the progress of member states in guaranteeing legislative protection and providing services for women, and it is here that NGOs play a critical role in evaluating government compliance with the convention’s standards of gender equity and demands for culture change. Yet it is also within the formal monitoring process that Merry discovers the many different uses and meanings of the concept of “culture” among stakeholders. For example, some member states appear to invoke culture, defined as traditional lifeways or primordialist identities, to excuse their lack of progress in complying with CEDAW reforms. In contrast, some local activists have found culture-specific resources to be quite effective responses to violence against women, as in the case of the Fijian custom of bulubulu, or reconciliation. Merry reveals how the CEDAW committee may at times ironically conflate the complexities of local traditions and reject some grassroots strategies as backward and, thus, obstacles to reform. Such rejections are the inevitable result of the legal-rational culture of secular transnational modernity espoused by UN actors, who, moreover, have little time to consider local cases in detail. Merry’s excellent discussion of the competing ethnicizations of local practices and global principles raises important questions about the potential for anthropology to contribute to refining human-rights discourse as a transnational legal framework.

In addition to following how CEDAW has emerged at the level of the United Nations—a task in itself of great value to human-rights scholarship—Merry’s captivating transnational ethnography examines how human rights become a part of local social movements and legal consciousness. In comparing India, Hong Kong, China, and the United States, she finds that a set of similar reforms (including domestic violence laws, shelters, community education efforts, and surveys) has been appropriated and adapted to local contexts. But do these changes have any lasting impact on those most in need of rights protection? Two case studies from Hawai‘i and Hong Kong reveal that although grassroots awareness and assertions depend on personal experiences reinforced by legal institutions that take human-rights reforms seriously, successful movements do not necessarily require deep or long-lasting commitments to human-rights discourse among local communities. The keys to the global flow of human-rights knowledge and practice are individual translators who are able to move between the layers of rights language and local women’s stories. Also crucial to the dialogue is the state, which, from the perspective of both the victim in need and the lofty UN committee hoping to implement change, remains the focus of action.
[notes, references, index]