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Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, Sally Engle Merry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 264 pp., $20 paper.

Sally Engle Merry’s book brings a muchneeded anthropological sensitivity to the complex question of the relation between cosmopolitan norms embedded in human rights and the particularities of local cultural practices. Indeed, she argues that this very way of setting up the question that is so familiar in debates in international ethics—in terms of cosmopolitan versus ‘‘cultural’’ norms—is fundamentally misleading. It is not the case that human rights norms are somehow beyond culture; rather, they represent a particular kind of culture, one that is increasingly embedded in transnational and national elites, both governmental and nongovernmental, but one that also remains alien to many grassroots activists in different parts of the world. Moreover, to speak of culture in the singular is also misleading. For Merry, cultures are not bounded entities, but patterns of cultural flows that are plural and contentious and frequently clash. Merry focuses on the interaction between human rights culture and various local contexts through examining a particular aspect of the human rights agenda, women’s human rights. Her account is based on fieldwork both in international conferences and institutions and in five different local contexts: Fiji, India, China, Hong Kong, and Hawaii. As she puts it, ‘‘This is an effort to do an ethnographic analysis of globalization, or at least a corner of it’’ (p. 29). Her analysis explores three areas in which transnational cultural flows between human rights culture and other cultural contexts take place. The first area is exemplified by transnational consensus building, when a variety of transnational actors put together policy documents, such as the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The second area encompasses the process of transplanting transnational programs on women’s rights from one context to another, such as when counseling services for battered women are created in one society and then transplanted, in the same form, to another. The third area consists of the processes through which transnational knowledge is localized in specific contexts. Merry’s analysis of all of these areas highlights the role of activists as intermediaries between the global and local (p. 2). Several of Merry’s findings are of particular interest. First, she highlights a paradox about human rights culture: it is most powerful and effective, but also most ethically and politically problematic, when it provides a clear alternative discourse to local practices and norms that exploit and abuse women. Merry considers, for