Conclusion
This chapter has identified some of the genealogical stages that have shaped concepts such as harmful traditional practices that are now categorised as ‘gender-based violence’. The umbrella term harmful traditional practices, which includes domestic violence, honour killings, rape, and FGM/C, has become central to the paradigm of women’s human rights and anti-discrimination agendas because of its all-encompassing nature. This formula was developed and refined by international organisations through political processes (lobbies, delegations, feminist movements, humanitarian actors, etc.). It has since been adapted to local contexts through vernacularisation within this human rights framework. According to Merry, vernacularisation transforms the universal language of human rights into local understandings of social justice. NGOs play a crucial role in taking humanitarian language about, for example, women’s human rights and adapting it to local perspectives. However, an organisation that identifies itself as a women’s rights NGO and relies heavily on this language for its international donors and audiences may not consistently prioritise human rights in its day-to-day work. It may focus on civil rights rather than human rights, or on empowering women in their families rather than promoting their rights (Merry 2006). In this way, cultural and gender anthropology shows how different meanings and practices emerge in small groups. It also highlights how vernacularisation circulates, is used, and sometimes abused.
The ethnographic studies cited in this chapter show that people have different understandings of gender-based violence and the global human rights framework. At different times and in different contexts, global formulae lead to local actions that establish new discursive regimes and inequalities, creating new femocratic classes, as the case of Rwanda shows (Fusaschi 2020b). These processes affect local life and culture over time and do not necessarily benefit women. As anthropologists, we must constantly question and redefine concepts such as culture, women and rights, especially in the light of current events. A shift in perspective on women’s rights within local sex/gender systems could change the way international law addresses gender-based violence, as the concept of violence is anthropologically unstable and relative, changing over time and contexts. Feminism is central to this debate about rights and FGM/C as harmful traditional practices to understand ‘what human rights do in the world’ (Asad 2000), because human rights have an air of liberation but remain rooted in the hidden workings of power that permeate the margins and crevices of institutions (Merry 2003).
Anthropological studies of connections and frictions are essential for understanding both historical and ideological dynamics. Feminism has participated in the construction of discourses, and certainly the cultural hegemony of white middle-class feminism has been one of the architects of its essentialist view of other women. It is imperative to acknowledge that certain critiques of the postcolonial and decolonial world have, in fact, perpetuated essentialisms with equal tenacity, using the same mechanisms to attack the Global North.
Analysing resistance, hybridisation, incorporation, and emotion in the spaces between the local and the global is crucial to understanding the complex relationships between power and everyday life. A more nuanced approach that considers both universality and particularity can promote dialogue rather than simple condemnation. Feminism in anthropology has taught us to document change, transformation, and departure. It is time for a paradigm shift and revision of definitions of FGM/C (Earp and Johnsdotter 2021) to develop concrete theories and attitudes that don’t invite us to choose between the two poles (universal/relative, local/global, feminism/feminisms, North/South). Instead, the pendulum (Dembour 2001) seems to have swung back to the static and timeless definitions of international conventions that have globally relegated gender-based violence to the realm of criminal law, focusing more on the consequences of practices than on the motivations and strategies by which they continue to be practised. The criminalisation of ‘cultural’ practices has consequences in local contexts that we as scholars need to question, as it tends to recreate another category – that of the victim, understood as a transnational moral subject, in the name of a supposed notion of justice that oscillates between compassion and repression. There is a growing need to study power (political, gender relations, institutional) as an integral part of culture, and how these are the key elements that enter into processes of subjectivation that confront the systems and languages of legitimation of our bodies.