Sally Engle Merry

Measuring the World

Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are indicators of rule of law, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for nongovernmental organizations and for the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of nongovernmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and between governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.

Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teaching and public education, (3) social critique, (4) collaboration, (5) advocacy, and (6) activism. They show that engagement takes place during fieldwork; through applied practice; in institutions such as Cultural Survival, the Institute for Community Research, and the Hispanic Health Council; and as individual activists work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice, human rights, and violence. A close examination of the history of engaged anthropology in the United States also reveals an enduring set of dilemmas, many of which persist in contemporary anthropological practice. These dilemmas were raised by the anthropologists who attended the Wenner‐Gren workshop titled “The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working toward a More Engaged Anthropology,” January 22–25, 2008. Their papers, many of which are included in this collection, highlight both the expansion and growth of engaged anthropology and the problems its practitioners face. To introduce this collection of articles, we discuss forms of engaged anthropology, its history, and its ongoing dilemmas.

Measuring the World Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance

Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are rule of law indicators, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for non-governmental organizations and that the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of non-governmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.

Defensible Space Undefended: Social Factors in Crime Control Through Environmental Design

The notion that crime can be prevented through environmental design is a recent and promising idea emerging from the fields of architecture and urban planning. However, despite intriguing correlations between crime rates and features of building design, we understand little about the social processes which induce residents to intervene to stop crimes and disorderly behavior in the spaces around them. This article investigates the conditions under which residents of an American inner-city housing project act and fail to act to defend both architecturally defensible and undefensible spaces. Because of the fragmented social fabric, even architecturally defensible spaces here are undefended.

The practice of human rights : tracking law between the global and the local

Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.

Rethinking Gossip and Scandal

Publisher Summary The analysis of gossip and scandal suggests that formal and informal social controls are not distinct and unrelated processes. They have significant continuities. Informal gossip may lead to formal collective implementation or feed into formal institutions of social control. For example, when gossip leads to a consensus in small-scale societies, leaders convert this into a formal sanction such as banishment or execution. In complex societies, informal talk acquires power through its impact on formal agencies. Further, the role of gossip and scandal in social control does not differ sharply between small-scale and complex societies. Gossip and scandal flourish whenever there are close-knit social networks and normative homogeneity. In both urban and rural societies, it serves as a way of drawing a social map of reputations and as a means of political competition and conflict. In both urban and rural societies, those with power and wealth, those who are marginal, and those with contacts outside the local social system are insulated from the consequences of gossip and relatively indifferent to its pressures. From this comparative analysis of the role of gossip and scandal, several specific hypotheses emerge that suggest general conditions under which they lead to effective social control.

Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance

The use of indicators is a prominent feature of contemporary global governance. Indicators are produced by organizations ranging from public actors such as the World Bank or the US State Department, to NGOs such as Freedom House, to hybrid entities such as the Global Fund, to private sector political risk rating agencies. They are used to compare and rank states for purposes as varied as deciding how to allocate foreign aid or investment and whether states have complied with their treaty obligations. This article defines the concept of an “indicator,” describes how indicators have recently been used in global governance, and identifies various ways in which the use of indicators has the potential to alter the nature of global governance. Particular attention is paid to how reliance on indicators affects the authority and contestability of decisions. The United Nations Human Development Index and the World Bank Doing Business indicators are analyzed as case studies.

Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women's Human Rights to Protection from Violence

How does a person come to understand his or her problems in terms of rights? This is a critical problem for the battered womens movement as well as for other human rights movements that rely on rights awareness to encourage victims to seek help from the law. The adoption of a rights consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that confirm that subjectivity. Rights-defined selves emerge from supportive encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. This empirical study shows how victims of violence against women come to take on rights consciousness.

Resistance and the cultural power of law

Current research in sociolegal studies focusing on resistance provides one way to continue the progressive politics of studying social transformation through law. In response to earlier concerns that the turn to postmodernism and the focus on individual acts of resistance has deflected scholarly work from attention to progressive politics, this article advocates broadening the question to examine a range of forms of resistance and their impact on cultural meanings as well as political mobilization. Through the examination of three examples of resistance that take place within and by means of legal institutions, the article endeavors to expand the frame of analysis to include the myriad processes by which the cultural world is made and remade.

Ideological Production: The Making of Community Mediation

Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.