Skip to main content

Sally Engle Merry

New York University, Anthropology, Faculty Member

Followers

640

Following

15

Co-authors

11

Public Views

Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is also a Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law, and past president of the American Ethnological Society. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwell, 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights, (co-edited with Mark Goodale

less

Interests

Uploads

Books by Sally Engle Merry

Awards and Distinguished Lectures

veryshortbio 16.doc

A World of Indicators. The making of governmental knowledge through quantification

by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Engle Merry, Sung-joon Park, and Johanna Mugler

The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing... more The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.

Artículos by Sally Engle Merry

Doing Vernacularization: The encounter between global and local ideas about women’s rights in Peru”

by Mercedes Crisóstomo, Peggy Levitt, and Sally Engle Merry

El articulo analiza la forma en la que los discursos globales sobre los derechos de las mujeres s... more

Papers by Sally Engle Merry

Empirical Legal Training in the U.S. Academy

by Christine B Harrington and Sally Engle Merry

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010

Law: Anthropological Aspects

by Sally Engle Merry and Matthew Canfield

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015

The Discourses of Mediation and the Power of Naming

Yale Journal of Law the Humanities, 2013

Governing through Indicators

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting American Society of International Law, 2009

The Mediation Process in Family and Neighbourhood Disputes

Group Analysis

The Social Organization of Mediation in Nonindustrial Societies: Implications for Informal Community Justice in America **Parts of this chapter were presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 1979, and the American Society of Criminology, November 1979. I am grateful for the comment...

Comparative Studies, 1982

Global Human Rights and Local Social Movements in a Legally Plural World

Canadian journal of law and society, 1997

CJLS/RCDS Vol. 12 #2{FalUautomne 1997) culturel sans pour autant mettre en place une force de coe... more

Relating to the Subjects of Human Rights: The Culture of Agency in Human Rights Discourse

Law and Anthropology, 2009

The Making of Human Rights Policy on Violence Against Women

Anthropology News, 2007

Changing rights, changing culture

Anthropological Perspectives, 2001

... is now repudiated within the discipline, it continues to determine the course of indigenous r... more ... is now repudiated within the discipline, it continues to determine the course of indigenous rights litigation, forcing ... and rights, but how claims to rights and to culture are articulated in global debates about ... The original creation of the human rights system was in part a response to ...

Governance by Indicators

Fluidity of Human Rights in Practice

Anthropology News, 2006

<i>Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru</i> (review)

Human Rights Quarterly, 2013

The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. MICHAEL HERZFELD

American Ethnologist, 1993

... The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. P... more

Law as Fair, Law as Help: The Texture of Legitimacy in American Society

Critical Issues in Social Justice, 1990

Awards and Distinguished Lectures

veryshortbio 16.doc

A World of Indicators. The making of governmental knowledge through quantification

by Richard Rottenburg, Sally Engle Merry, Sung-joon Park, and Johanna Mugler

The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing... more The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.

Doing Vernacularization: The encounter between global and local ideas about women’s rights in Peru”

by Mercedes Crisóstomo, Peggy Levitt, and Sally Engle Merry

El articulo analiza la forma en la que los discursos globales sobre los derechos de las mujeres s... more

Empirical Legal Training in the U.S. Academy

by Christine B Harrington and Sally Engle Merry

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010

Law: Anthropological Aspects

by Sally Engle Merry and Matthew Canfield

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015

The Discourses of Mediation and the Power of Naming

Yale Journal of Law the Humanities, 2013

Governing through Indicators

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting American Society of International Law, 2009

The Mediation Process in Family and Neighbourhood Disputes

Group Analysis

The Social Organization of Mediation in Nonindustrial Societies: Implications for Informal Community Justice in America **Parts of this chapter were presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 1979, and the American Society of Criminology, November 1979. I am grateful for the comment...

Comparative Studies, 1982

Global Human Rights and Local Social Movements in a Legally Plural World

Canadian journal of law and society, 1997

CJLS/RCDS Vol. 12 #2{FalUautomne 1997) culturel sans pour autant mettre en place une force de coe... more

Relating to the Subjects of Human Rights: The Culture of Agency in Human Rights Discourse

Law and Anthropology, 2009

The Making of Human Rights Policy on Violence Against Women

Anthropology News, 2007

Changing rights, changing culture

Anthropological Perspectives, 2001

... is now repudiated within the discipline, it continues to determine the course of indigenous r... more ... is now repudiated within the discipline, it continues to determine the course of indigenous rights litigation, forcing ... and rights, but how claims to rights and to culture are articulated in global debates about ... The original creation of the human rights system was in part a response to ...

Governance by Indicators

Fluidity of Human Rights in Practice

Anthropology News, 2006

<i>Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru</i> (review)

Human Rights Quarterly, 2013

The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. MICHAEL HERZFELD

American Ethnologist, 1993

... The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. P... more

Law as Fair, Law as Help: The Texture of Legitimacy in American Society

Critical Issues in Social Justice, 1990

Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism.(Book Review)

The Contemporary Pacific, Mar 22, 2006

ABSTRACT

Manipulating anonymity: Streetwalkers� strategies for safety in the city

Ethnos, 1980

Ideology in the Language of Judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics, and Courtroom Control

J Linguist Anthropol, 2008

Spatial governmentality and the new urban social order : Controlling gender violence through law : Remapping the city: Place, order, and ideology

American Anthropologist Journal of the American Anthropological Association, 2001

The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline,... more The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline, and security. Scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of the art and rationality of governance, or govemmentality, have explored how urban social orders are increasingly based on the governance of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offenses. The new urban social order is characterized by privatized security systems and consumer-policed spaces such as malls. Gender violence interventions represent another deployment of spatial forms of govemmentality. Over the last two decades, punishment of batterers has been augmented by disciplinary systems that teach batterers new forms of masculinity and by security systems for women based on spatial separation. In the postmodern city, spatial govemmentality is integrally connected with punishment and discipline. These new forms of governance circulate globally along with neoliberal ideas of the diminished state, [gender violence, govemmentality, urban society, globalization, law]

Symposium on "Opposing the rule of law"

by nick cheesman and Sally Engle Merry

Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL: Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing... more Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL:

Nick Cheesman's much praised Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order is the first major study of courts and politics in contemporary Myanmar. It advances both general theory and close empirical description at the highest level. Opposing the Rule of Law contributes significantly and distinctively to the theory of the rule of law and to legal and political theory more generally. It develops a persuasive argument that the rule of law is opposed to law and order, a concept with which it is commonly conflated–in Myanmar but more widely as well. Regimes that 'lack' the rule of law rarely encounter an absence, but the presence of something else, opposed to the rule of law, which has its own characteristics that need to be explored and understood. Such understanding matters both intellectually and practically: to how we think and to what we should do. At the same time, by paying close attention to the Burmese-language records of 393 criminal cases supplemented by findings from fieldwork and archival research of hitherto unutilised or underutilised published and classified official documents, the book pushes the study of politics in contemporary Myanmar beyond the binary of democracy movement versus military dictatorship, and also disrupts conventional thinking about how authoritarian rulers use courts for political ends. As a result of its layered and sophisticated complexity, then, Opposing the Rule of Law not merely advances our understanding of politics and law in Myanmar, but significantly advances contemporary discussion of the rule of law.

Symposium table of contents:

Introduction: Ronald Janse on Behalf of the Editorial Board of the HJRL
Ronald Janse Pages 1-2

Rule of Law Inside Out in Myanmar
Frank Munger Pages 3-10

What Is the Rule of Law? Perspectives from Myanmar
Sally Engle Merry Pages 11-14

Enlivening Rule of Law Through Law and Order
Jothie Rajah Pages 15-18

The Rule of Law and Its Rivals
Martin Krygier Pages 19-27

Taking the Rule of Law’s Opposition Seriously
Nick Cheesman Pages 29-44

A measure of the measure of measuring

by Nayanika Mathur, Andrea Ballestero, Denise Brennan, and Sally Engle Merry

American Anthropologist, 2019

Special review section on Sally Engle Merry's, 'The Seductions of Quantification'.