As the international system focuses more attention on the problem of violence against women, the demand for accurate information to test policies and to promote accountability has grown. But measuring such a multi-faceted phenomenon through universal categories and strategies is very difficult. In the process of counting and measuring, women’s own experiences are often left out. Moreover, mechanisms of counting tend to reinforce an essentialized idea of gender that remains fundamental to UN deliberations. They also neglect vernacular meanings of women’s rights. Since such technologies of knowledge form the basis for policy and performance assessments, understanding their implicit cultural assumptions and erasures is critically important.

This lecture was funded by a grant from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and Law and Society at New York University. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton University Press, 2000),  Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice  (University of Chicago Press,  2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwells 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Local and the Global (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge University Press, 2007). She is past president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and president-elect of the American Ethnological Society. The Law and Society Association awarded her the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002 and the Kalven Prize for overall scholarly contributions to socio-legal scholarship in 2007. The School of American Research awarded her the J.I.Staley Prize in 2010 for Human Rights and Gender Violence.