Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global Responses, Local Practices

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Description

Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global Responses, Local Practices addresses the gaps in theory, methods, and practices that are currently used to engage the problem of gender-based violence. This book complements the work carried out in the legal, social work, and medical fields by demonstrating how a focus on local issues and local responses can better inform a collaborative global response to the problem of gender-based violence. With chapters covering Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, and Oceania, it provides ample evidence that richly textured and qualitatively informed research can illuminate work that is more quantitative in scope. The volume illustrates the various ways scholars, practitioners, frontline workers, and policy makers can work together to end forms of violence in their local communities. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that the ways top-down responses to violence have been inadequate, and that solutions are available when the local historical, political, and social context is taken into consideration. Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence contains useful insights that, when combined with the efforts of other disciplines, offer solutions to the problem of gender-based violence.

Reviews

This volume represents a new generation of anthropological thinking on gender-based violence: at once, local and global, refusing to choose between culture and political economy (or bodies and minds), and presenting complex analyses of pragmatic efforts to resolve entrenched social problems while also recognizing the potentials and pitfalls of relying on "community" or engagement with a bureaucratic and capitalist state. Wies and Haldane have assembled an impressive ethnographic collection that documents collaborative, and sometimes contentious, efforts by scholars, activists and survivors to better understand and thus undermine gender-based violence within contexts (e.g. natural disasters, political violence, university campuses) and among people (e.g. trafficked indigenous women, fathers, scholar-activists) not often included in studies of gender-based violence. -- Madelaine Adelman, Arizona State University
Sometimes working in the field of gender-based violence can be lonely,' the editors of this volume remark in their introductory chapter. 'It is underfunded work, often unrecognized, and in some cases, seems unending and unsolvable.' Hence, the studies in this book, grounded by ethnographic data and impelled by social activism, are a valuable addition to the anthropological corpus. Contributors demonstrate that gender-based violence is global in its reach and culturally nuanced within local contexts. They also make clear the challenges of using feminist ideas to effect positive social changes. The strongest chapters, Mark Schullers discussion of post-earthquake Haiti and Melissa Beskes treatment of intimate partner violence in Belize, for example, attend to gender as intersectional and activism as complicated by researchers positionalities. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. * CHOICE *
With chapters covering Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, and Oceania, the book provides ample evidence that richly-textured and qualitatively-informed research can illuminate work that is more quantitative in scope. . . .The volume contains useful insights that, when combined with the efforts of other disciplines, offer solutions to the problem of gender-based violence. * Hartford Courant *

Author Bio

Jennifer R. Wies is associate professor and program director of anthropology at Eastern Kentucky University. Hillary J. Haldane is associate professor and program director of anthropology at Quinnipiac University.