In this paper, I examine the diversity of opinions held by front-line family violence workers in Auckland, Aotearoa, on the issue of culturally specific care. Front-line workers are positioned at the interface between the system of services and benefits available from the state and the victims in need. In order to make sense of family violence discourses operating at the national level, I use front-line workers' perspectives to analyse the national frameworks for culturally specific care designed for Asian, Pakeha, Pasifika and Maori victims of violence. This article highlights the distance between policy and quotidian front-line service delivery.
This paper examines the discourse of autism as we have experienced it as parents of an autistic six year‐old girl. Because both authors are anthropologists, we were professionally trained to understand something of what discourses are and do. However, our training did not necessarily help us blunt the original force of the diagnosis. Over time we have come to understand both our daughter and the discourse that is said to define her differently, and these understandings have fed back into our understanding of our discipline. One key transformative event occurred when we took our family to live in a village where we had done previous research. This reminded us of the conceptual power of discourses: we put the discourse of autism to work for our own purposes, but at the same time it works on us, shapes us in ways we do not always realize.
The contested relationship between gender violence and the "culture concept" can be found in the cultural defense of gender violence, gender violence linked to postcolonial retraditionalizations of family life, the underpolicing of gender violence associated with communities labeled as culturally backward, and the overpolicing of activities categorized by human rights advocates as harmful traditional practices. Culture has been used to defend, explain, or excuse gender violence, and seen as a barrier to the elimination of gender violence. Here, however, the authors analyze how culture has been mobilized strategically as a resource in the struggle against gender violence.
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