Mediated norms and legal encounters: Localizing women's human rights and feminism in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

摘要

This dissertation examines how human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania employ international human rights laws to advocate for women's legal rights, particularly land and inheritance rights. Through detailed ethnographic research of a group of human rights NGOs, this work examines how transnational norms such as "international rights"---be they laws and/or discourses---are perceived, translated and redeployed by NGO practitioners. Using literature from legal anthropology, the anthropology of rights and feminist legal theory, this work explores four central questions. How do Tanzanian human rights NGOs and their members conceive and employ women's rights and rights laws? How do their conceptions of feminism influence NGO members' practices concerning women's legal rights? How do laywomen themselves experience the law and attain their rights through these NGOs? Finally, how are cultural normative orders negotiated and expressed with respect to human rights and what potential do international human rights laws hold for Tanzanian women in the venues offered by these NGOs? International human rights are constantly being reconceptualized, renegotiated and differently utilized at all levels of exchange---from international to regional forums, within institutions such as NGOs, and again at the individual and interpersonal level. This research argues that examining the "social life of rights" or how rights are used in everyday practice is central to understanding their potential for change. In order to understand the potential for human rights in this context, I examine the structural constraints as well as individual agency that work together to constitute conceptions and the realization of women's rights in Tanzania.