smerry@wellesley.edu
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smerry@wellesley.edu
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Sally Engle Merry is Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College. She is also co-director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program.
Her current work explores how international human rights law is interpreted in China, India, Nigeria, and Peru. Her recent book, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. She has recently published articles on women's human rights, violence against women, and the process of localizing human rights. Her book, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), received the 2001 J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. She has published four other books: Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai’i and Fiji (co-edited with Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press, 2004), The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation (co-edited with Neal Milner, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working Class Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (Temple University Press, 1981).
She is the author of over one hundred articles and reviews on law, anthropology, race and class, conflict resolution, and gender violence. She is past-president of the Law and Society Association and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.
Recent Publications:
Books:
2005 (forthcoming) Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2004 Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai'i and Fiji. Co-edited with Donald Brenneis. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM
2000 Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Recipient of 2002 James Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History of the Law and Society Association.
Articles:
2004. “Colonial and Postcolonial Law.” Pp. 569-588 in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, Austin Sarat, ed. London: Blackwell Publishing.
2004. " Law and Identity in an American Colony." Pp. 123 - 152 in Law and Empire in the Pacific co-edited with Donald Brenneis. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
2003 "Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way)” Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 26:1: 55-77.
2003 “Constructing a Global Law - Violence Against Women and the Human Rights System” Law and Social Inquiry 28:4: 941-979.
2003 “From Law and Colonialism to Law and Globalization: A Review Essay on Martin Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia.” Law and Social Inquiry 28:2: 269-290.
2003. “Hegemony and Culture in Historical Anthropology: A Review Essay on Jean and John L. Comaroff, From Revelation to Revolution, Vols. I. and II. American Historical Review. Volume 108, No. 2, April 2003: 460-70.
2003. “Christian Conversion and ‘Racial’ Labor Capacities: Constructing Racialized Identities in Hawai‘i.” Pp. 203-238 in Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity. Richard Warren Perry and Bill Maurer, eds. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
2003 “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence.” Human Rights Quarterly 25:2: 343-381.
2003 “Kapi‘olani at the Brink: Dilemmas of Historical Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i.” American Ethnologist 30:1: 44-61.
2002 "Ethnography in the Archives." Pp. 128-142 in June Starr and Mark Goodale (eds.), Practicing Ethnography in Law: New Dialogues, Enduring Methods. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's.
2002. “Governmentality and Gender Violence in Hawai‘i in Historical Perspective.” Social and Legal Studies 11(1): 81-110.
2001. "Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law." American Anthropologist 103: 16-30.
2001 "Rights, Religion, and Community: Approaches to Violence Against Women in the Context of Globalization." Law and Society Review 35: 39-88.
2001 “Women, Violence, and the Human Rights System." Pp.83-98 in Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective. Margery Agosin, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press.
2001 “Changing rights, changing culture." Pp.31-56 in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds. London: Cambridge University Press.
2001 “Racialized Identities and the Law." Pp. 120-139 in Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader. Edited by Ida Susser and Thomas C. Patterson. New York: Blackwell Publishers.
2000 “Crossing Boundaries: Methodological Challenges for Ethnography in the Twenty-first Century.” Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 23 (2): 127-134.
2000 "Mennonite Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation: A Cultural Analysis." Pp. 203-217 in From the Ground Up. John Paul Lederach and Cynthia Sampson, Eds. New York: Oxford University Press.
2000 "Globalizations Past: From Lahaina to London in the 1820s." pp. 81- 101. Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation and Innovation. Edited by Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Dartmouth.
1998. "The Criminalization of Everyday Life." Pp. 14 - 40 in Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases. Austin Sarat, ed. Northwestern Univ. Press.
1998. "Law, Culture, and Cultural Appropriation." Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. 10:101-129.
1998 “Global Human Rights and Local Social Movements in a Legally Plural World." Canadian Journal of Law and Society 12: 247-271.
1997 "Legal Vernacularization and Transnational Culture: the Ka Ho'okolokolonui Kanaka Maoli, Hawai'i 1993." Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. Richard Wilson, ed. Pp. 28-49. Pluto Press.
Reprinted in Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19: 67-83, May 1996.
1995 "Gender Violence and Legally Engendered Selves." Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2:49-73.
1995 "Wife Battering and the Ambiguities of Rights." Pp. 271-307 in Identities, Politics, and Rights. Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.
1995 "Resistance and the Cultural Power of Law." Presidential Address, Law and Society Review 29: 11-27.
1994 "Courts as Performances: Domestic Violence Hearings in a Hawai'i Family Court." pp. 35 - 59 in Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance. Susan Hirsch and Mindie Lazarus-Black, eds. New York: Routledge.
Current Research:
I am currently working on an NSF-funded research project in conjunction with Peggy Levitt, Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, on a comparative study of the localization of women's human rights in India, China, Nigeria, and Peru.