Abstract
This is an important book for the teaching, training, and reference of social workers and other human services practitioners, administrators, academics, policy makers, humanitarian aid workers, and other antiviolence workers of many kinds. Once past the inexplicably dull cover and exorbitant price (libraries, resource centers, and organizations that serve these constituencies should purchase this book because most of those who work in these fields will not be able to), this highly accessible and well-crafted anthology provides a culturally rich, diverse, and experientially embedded journey throughout a multinational globe-scape. In a clearly written (and unmissable) introduction to the collection of 12 chapters, Wies and Haldane review the principles and purposes of applied anthropology in terms that make their subject immediately applicable to social work values, particularly an expanded and expansive reconsideration of the vast spectrum and possibilities of human relationships in a human rights context that tends toward the realistic (and attainable) rather than the idealistic.
Also notable is their successful determination to make this book reach, imaginatively, to apply theory to gender-based violence writ very large, indeed. As one of several professional sectors to struggle with what to call and where to locate violence that has gender bias, inequality, disrespect, stigma, and so on, at its core, social workers will appreciate efforts that Wies and Haldane make to locate such gender-based violence in a social architecture of “state-imposed structures of inequality and violence” (p. 2). This orientation to the subject sets the frame for two aspects of applied anthropology that define this volume: (1) applied anthropology begins with an intent to address social problems identified by communities and (2) tailor design of the implementation of projects (about gender-based violence, in this case) to the affected population(s) in best practices that are holistic and address comparative aspects of culture. A further anthropological concept that makes the collection valuable is the editors’ adoption of Sally Engle Merry’s concept of “deterritorialized ethnography” (p. 7) that places the emphasis on the problem of the violence, rather than the place where it occurs, in their selection of some case studies. Recognizing potential difficulties of overgeneralization across cultures, they also employ critical counterpoint to their discourse in order to understand the performance of gender-based violence within each individual locale, culture, and people that “reterritorializes” ethnography (p. 7).
This collection elucidates approaches and applications to gender-based violence through a global journey via expert accounts of sex trafficking of native peoples in the United States, refugee resettlement of Somali women and domestic violence in Kenya, gender and genocide in Guatemala, campus violence, postdisaster violence against women in Haiti, promotion of positive masculinities to reduce domestic violence in Northern Uganda, and others. In addition to keen and well-articulated analyses of gender-based violence throughout these case studies, several chapters speak specifically to applied research methodologies and scholar activism in mixed method and ethnographic studies. Rebecka Lundgren and Kimberly Ashburn, for example, in “I’m a REAL Father Now!” (Chapter 10, pp. 135–152), provide a thoroughgoing account of the “iterative process of research, program implementation, and stakeholder and participant involvement during the development and testing of the REAL (Responsible, Engaged and Loving) Fathers Initiative (RFI), a program to prevent family violence in northern Uganda” (p. 135). The authors clearly articulate rationale, processes, and implementation of quantitative and qualitative methods in multistep research, immersion in communities, and an admirably comprehensible discussion of their findings, all while inviting the reader to engage deeply in a culture of inequitable gender norms, toward transformation.
To engage a practitioner, scholar activist, and/or student readership further, each author has concluded her or his chapter with a set of questions to extend the discussion. Wies and Haldane explain that they have invited these questions as a way for the authors to create a dialogue with readers to build some sense of community in what is often “lonely” and “underfunded” work. This worthy collection reveals the plausibility and ethos of their mission through the contributors’ incisive scholarship, skill, and empathy.