RUI: Rights, Religion, and Community: Local and Global Discourses of Gender Violence

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The 1990s movement to define gender violence as a human rights violation raises basic questions about the cultural frame of the law, and the relationship between universal discourses of rights and cultural and religious difference. This project examines three approaches to gender violence in a small town in Hawaii. One approach is based on the idea of rights and the use of the legal definition of battering within marriage as a crime; the second, evangelical Christian, is based on the religious conception of marriage and the family and seeks to preserve the marriage and develop a less violent relationship through divine assistance; the third, a Native Hawaiian problem-solving process, grows out of efforts to recuperate more consensual, community-grounded forms of conflict resolution by indigenous peoples. These approaches represent competing paradigms of social justice, based on democracy and the rule of law, on religious faith, and on culturally distinct communities. The researcher will study the implicit categories of persons and responsibilities involved in the different paradigms, and the relation of differences to global debates about gender violence and human rights. Using ethnographic methods of in-depth interviews as well as case analysis of legal proceedings, collect documents and training materials and through participant observation, the researcher will advance our understanding of the often antagonistic, sometimes mutually constituted nature of these three paradigms of social justice.