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Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism pp 207–228Cite as

Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle

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Part of the book series: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice ((IUSGENT,volume 17))

Abstract

How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.

This chapter first appeared as an article in the American Anthropologist in 2006; see volume 108(1), at pages 38–51. I am grateful to the Cultural Anthropology Program and Law and Social Sciences Program, National Science Foundation, BCS-9904441, for support for this research. I am also grateful for research support from Wellesley College and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. I also benefited from a fellowship year at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University. Mark Goodale, Richard Rottenburg, and Aradhana Anu Sharma provided helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Benedict Dembour & Richard Wilson (eds.), Culture and Rights (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  2. 2.

    Winifred Tate, “Counting the Dead: Human Rights Claims and Counter-Claims in Columbia” (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, New York University, 2004).

  3. 3.

    Mark Goodale, “Legal Ethnography in an Era of Globalization: The Arrival of Western Human Rights Discourse to Rural Bolivia” in June Starr and Mark Goodale (eds.), Practicing Ethnography in Law: New Dialogues, Enduring Methods (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 50–72.

  4. 4.

    Celestine Nyamu-Musembi, “Are Local Norms and Practices Fences or Pathways? The Example of Women’s Property Rights” in Abdullahi An-Naim (ed.), Cultural Transformation and Human Rights in Africa (London, Zed Books, 2002), pp. 126–150.

  5. 5.

    Hussaina J. Abdullah, “Religious Revivalism, Human Rights Activism and the Struggle for Women’s Rights in Nigeria.” pp. 151–191 in Abdullahi An-Na’im, supra note 4, p.151 at 152–153.

  6. 6.

    Shannon Speed and Jane Collier, “Limiting Indigenous Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico: The State Government’s Use of Human Rights” (2000) 22 Human Rights Quarterly 877–905.

  7. 7.

    Marilyn Strathern, “Losing (Out on) Intellectual Resources” in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (eds.), Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 201–234.

  8. 8.

    H.J. Abdullah, “Religious Revivalism, Human Rights Activism and the Struggle for Women’s Rights in Nigeria”, supra note 5, pp. 169–171.

  9. 9.

    Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (eds.), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  10. 10.

    UN 1996. The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action. United Nations, New York: Department of Public Information, pp. 33–34.

  11. 11.

    See Annelise Riles, “Infinity within the Brackets” (1998) 25 American Ethnologist 378–9; and Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  12. 12.

    See Abdullahi An-Na’im, “Toward a Cross-Cultural Approach to Defining International Standards of Human Rights: The Meaning of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im (ed.), Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: A Quest for Consensus (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 19–44; Abdullahi An-Na’im and Jeffrey Hammond, “Cultural Transformation and Human Rights in African Societies” in Abdullahi An-Na’im (ed.), supra note 4, pp. 13–38; and Radhika Coomaraswamy, “To Bellow like a Cow: Women, Ethnicity, and the Discourse of Rights” in Rebecca J. Cook (ed.), Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 39–57.

  13. 13.

    But see J.K. Cowan, M.-B. Dembour & R. Wilson, supra note 1.

  14. 14.

    Max Gluckman, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester, Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingston Institute, 1955); Max Gluckman, “Concepts in the Comparative Study of Tribal Law” in Laura Nader (ed.), Law in Culture and Society (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), pp. 349–373.

  15. 15.

    Paul Bohannan, “Ethnography and Comparison in Legal Anthropology” in L. Nader, supra note 14, pp. 401–418.

  16. 16.

    Paul Bohannan, Justice and Judgment among the Tiv of Nigeria (London, Oxford University Press, 1957).

  17. 17.

    P. Bohannan, “Ethnography and Comparison in Legal Anthropology” supra note 14, p. 411.

  18. 18.

    Ibid.

  19. 19.

    Laura Nader (ed.), Law in Culture and Society (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).

  20. 20.

    Kim Berry discusses the way Indian policies toward women’s development were shaped by the US emphasis on the woman as housewife, an idea that conformed to the ideas of local elites in some parts of India that a family’s honor is connected to a woman’s confinement to the home. American ideas of female domesticity also conformed to Indian nationalist representations of women as mothers of the nation: Kim Berry, “Developing Women: The Traffic in Ideas about Women and Their Needs in Kangra, India.” in K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal (eds.), Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 75 at 84–85.

  21. 21.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, Verso Books, 1983).

  22. 22.

    David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation” (1986) 51(4) American Sociological Review 464–481; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movements: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  23. 23.

    David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization” (1988) 1 International Social Movement Research 197 at 198 as quoted in David A Snow, “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields” in David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2004), p. 380 at 384.

  24. 24.

    Myra Marx Ferree, “Resonance and Radicalism: Feminist Framing in the Abortion Debates of the United States and Germany” (2003) 109(2) American Journal of Sociology 304, 308.

  25. 25.

    D.A. Snow, supra note 23, at p. 394.

  26. 26.

    Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 12–13.

  27. 27.

    Marc W. Steinberg, “The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Spinners” (1999) 105 American Journal of Sociology 736–780; D.A. Snow, supra note 23, at p. 403.

  28. 28.

    D.A. Snow, supra note 23, at p. 401.

  29. 29.

    D.A. Snow et al., “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization”, supra note 23, 477.

  30. 30.

    M.M. Ferree, “Resonance and Radicalism: Feminist Framing in the Abortion Debates of the United States and Germany”, supra note 24, 305.

  31. 31.

    Ibid, 340.

  32. 32.

    Sally Engle Merry and Rachel Stern, “The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the Local/Global Interface” (2005) 46(3) Current Anthropology 387–409.

  33. 33.

    Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  34. 34.

    Sally Engle Merry, “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence” (2003) 25(2) Human Rights Quarterly 343–381.

  35. 35.

    S.E. Merry and Rachel Stern, “The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the Local/Global Interface”, supra note 32.

  36. 36.

    See for example: James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986); Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993).

  37. 37.

    Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. School of American Research Advanced Seminar (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986), p. 141 at 163–164.

  38. 38.

    Studies of the dilemmas activists face in trying to win asylum status for their clients underscore this dilemma. Both McKinley (1997) and Ticktin (1999) show, in different cases, how an African or South Asian woman’s story of abuse had to be reframed as one in which she has been victimized by custom in order to win asylum status in the US and the UK: Michelle McKinley, “Life Stories, Disclosure, and the Law” (1997) 20(2) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 70–83; Miriam Ticktin, “Selling Suffering in the Courtroom and Marketplace: An Analysis of the Autobiography of Kiranjit Ahluwalia” (1999) 22(1) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24– 42.

  39. 39.

    Max Gluckman, “The Village Headman in British Central Africa: Introduction” (1949) 19(2) Africa 89, 93–94.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Richard Rottenburg, Weit hergeholte Fakten: Eine Parabel der Entwicklungshilfe [Far-fetched facts: A parable of development] (Stuttgart, Lucius und Lucius, 2002).

  42. 42.

    R. Rottenburg, supra note 41, p. 232.

  43. 43.

    Ibid, pp. 228–229.

  44. 44.

    Ibid, pp. 15–16.

  45. 45.

    Ethan Michelson, “Global Institutions, Local Meaning: Appropriation and Indigenization in the Chinese Legal System” [2005, on file with author].

  46. 46.

    Sally Engle Merry, “Rights, Religion, and Community: Approaches to Violence against Women in the Context of Globalization” (2001) 35 Law and Society Review 39–88.

  47. 47.

    Ella Lee, South China Morning Post, Feb. 16, 2002, p. 4; Caroline Yeung,“Wife Abuse: A Brief Historical Review on Research and Intervention” (1991) 25 Hong Kong Journal of Social Work 29, at 35; Catherine So-Kum Tang, Antoinette Lee, and Fanny Mui-Ching Cheung “Violence against Women in Hong Kong” in Fanny M. Cheung, Malavika Karlekar, Aurora De Dios, Juree Vichit-Vadakan, and Lourdes R. Quisumbing (eds.) (Hong Kong, Equal Opportunities Commission in collaboration with Women in Asian Development and UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, 1999), pp. 38–58.

  48. 48.

    Ellen Pence and Michael Paymar, Education Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model (New York, Springer Publishing Company, 1993).

  49. 49.

    Chan Ko Ling 2000 Unraveling the Dynamics of Spousal Abuse through the Narrative Accounts of Chinese Male Batterers. Ph.D. dissertation (publication no. 61332), Department of Social Work and Social Welfare, University of Hong Kong.

  50. 50.

    Ibid, p. 195.

  51. 51.

    Ibid, p. 166.

  52. 52.

    Ibid, p. 146.

  53. 53.

    Ibid, p. 318.

  54. 54.

    Ibid, p. 130, 148.

  55. 55.

    C.K. Ling, supra note 49, p. 144.

  56. 56.

    Ibid, pp. 148–153.

  57. 57.

    Ibid, p. 387.

  58. 58.

    Ibid, p. 421 [emphasis in original].

  59. 59.

    Ibid, p. 430.

  60. 60.

    C.K. Ling, supra note 49, v.

  61. 61.

    Sally Engle Merry, “Gender Violence and Legally Engendered Selves” (1995) 2 Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 49– 73.

  62. 62.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), Domestic Violence in India, vols. 1–5. Washington, DC: USAID/India, p. 49; Aradhana Sharma, “Cross-breeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women’s “Empowerment,” Neoliberal Governmentality, and Engendered Statehood in India” (2006) 21 Cultural Anthropology 60–95.

  63. 63.

    Veena Poonacha, and Divya Pandey Responses to Domestic Violence in the States of Karnataka and Gujarat (Mumbai, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University, 1999), p. 161; A. Sharma, supra note 62; International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), Domestic Violence in India, vols. 1–5 (Washington, DC, USAID/India, 1999–2002), pp. 32–65.

  64. 64.

    It promoted women’s equality along with health, literacy and non-formal education, savings, political involvement, and community development initiatives. The program uses “conscientization” and “empowerment” to describe the process by which women collectively become aware of their situations and take action to address their problems (A. Sharma, supra note 62).

  65. 65.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 70.

  66. 66.

    A. Sharma, supra note 62.

  67. 67.

    Ibid.

  68. 68.

    In 1998 they received only slightly above the government-stipulated minimum wage for skilled work (A. Sharma, supra note 62, at footnote 42).

  69. 69.

    Mekhala Krishnamurthy, In the Shadow of the State, in the Shade of a Tree: The Politics of the Possible in Rural Gujarat (BA thesis, Department of Social Sciences, Harvard University, 2002), p. 42.

  70. 70.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 49.

  71. 71.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 34.

  72. 72.

    M. Krishnamurthy, supra note 69, p. 3, based on Annual MS Reports.

  73. 73.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 36.

  74. 74.

    V. Poonacha and D. Pandey, supra note 63, pp. 161–178.

  75. 75.

    A. Sharma, supra note 62.

  76. 76.

    M. Krishnamurthy, supra note 69, pages 12 and 51.

  77. 77.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 51.

  78. 78.

    Ibid, p. 99.

  79. 79.

    Ibid, pp. 40–41, 54.

  80. 80.

    International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) (1999–2002), supra note 63, p. 72.

  81. 81.

    See Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1989).

  82. 82.

    A. Sharma, supra note 62.

  83. 83.

    K. Berry, supra note 20, at pp. 86–87.

  84. 84.

    K. Berry, supra note 20, at pp. 94–96.

  85. 85.

    Marc W. Steinberg, supra note 27.

  86. 86.

    Inderpal Grewal, “On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice” in Ella Shohat (ed.), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 501 at 507.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, New York University, 10003, New York, NY, USA

    Sally Engle Merry

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  1. Fac. Law, Centre for Human Rights &, McGill University, Peel Street 3644, Montreal, H3A 1W9, Québec, Canada

    René Provost

  2. , Faculty of Law, McGill University, Peel 3644, Montreal, H3A 1W9, Québec, Canada

    Colleen Sheppard

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Merry, S.E. (2013). Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle. In: Provost, R., Sheppard, C. (eds) Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4710-4_10

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