Deterritorialized Ethnography: Gender Violence and the Anthropology of Globalization

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9904441Merry This project studies the global movement of violence against women as it has developed within the international human rights community as an instance of a deterritorialized community. The researcher, a cultural anthropologist from Wellesley College, focuses on competing discourses about gender violence, including discrimination, inequality, or patriarchy as these have been debated among domestic and international activists, governmental organizations and UN agencies and conferences. The study explores new ways of doing ethnography in a globalizing postcolonial world, where much of the phenomena of interest is "placeless" and information flows rapidly. The distinctive contribution of ethnography has always been its focus on small-scale social units and the cultural meanings and practices which constitute them. This project adopts this methodology to explore the new political and cultural configurations produced by globalization. By examining both a local site embedded in global discourse and a deterritorialized global network of meetings and forms of communication, it takes an ethnographic approach to the intersections and overlaps of local and global places. The investigator will study the discourse about gender violence in Hawaii and Fiji and in the deterritorialized space of UN deliberations and transnational NGOs. The Hawaii research is already done, this project now goes further with a brief comparative study in Fiji, a setting similar to Hawaii, and participant observation at the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the UN Commission on the Status of Women as well as other NGOs focused on gender violence. This project will produce valuable information about a relatively new phenomenon, transnational cultural-political movements, as well as advance our understanding ofthe developing global reaction against gender violence.