9320009 MERRY The boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence is culturally defined and historically changing. Through court cases involving domestic violence, the law defines not only what constitutes criminal violence but also what constitutes appropriate behavior for men and women in intimate relationships. In order to examine the role courts play in reinforcing or challenging cultural meanings about gender and violence, this project studies the changing ways domestic violence cases are handled in a single local court over a period of 140 years. Data will collected through a detailed study of court records and observation of court officials as they process cases. Court records indicate how domestic violence is described by victims, justified by batterers, and determined to be acceptable or not by judges over this time period. The ethnographic research will document how these cases are currently being handled and how court officials, defendants, and victims now think and talk about wife battering. The location of the study, a small town in the plantation region of Hawai'i, is one which has experienced American colonialism and now has a culturally plural community.
