Areas of Research/Interest

Anthropology of law; human rights; colonialism; transnationalism; gender and race; US, Pacific and Asia/Pacific region.

Publications

Selected Publication

1981  Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

1990  Getting Justice and Getting Even:  Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans. Chicago, IL:
         University of Chicago Press. Chinese edition, Peking Univ. Press

1993  The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation.  Co-edited with Neal Milner.
         Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.  

2000  Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
          Awarded the 2002 James Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History of the Law and Society Association.

2004  Law and Empire in the Pacific: Hawai'i and Fiji. Co-edited with Donald Brenneis.
         School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM

2006  Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

            2010. Winner of the J.I. Staley Prize of the School for Advanced Research.

            2008   Oxford University Press of India edition.

            2010   Spanish language edition, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia.

2007  The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local.  Co-edited with Mark Goodale.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2009     Gender Violence: A Cultural Introduction.  London: Blackwell.

2001  "Rights, Religion, and Community: Approaches to Violence Against Women in the Context of Globalization."  Law and Society Review   35: 39-88.

2001  "Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence through Law." American Anthropologist  103: 16-30.

2003  “Kapi‘olani at the Brink: Dilemmas of Historical Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i.”  American Ethnologist  30:1: 44-61.

2003 “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence.”  Human Rights Quarterly  25:2: 343-381.

2005 "The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the Local/Global Interface." Co-authored with Rachel Stern. Current Anthropology   46 (3): 387-409.

2006. “ Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism:  Mapping the Middle”  American Anthropologist 108 (1): 38-51.

2009.  Vernacularization in Action: Using Global Women's Human Rights Locally.  Special Issue of Global Networks 9 (4),  co- edited with Peggy Levitt.

2009.  “Vernacularization on the ground: Local uses of global women’s rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.”  Global Networks 9 (4): 441–461. co-authored with Peggy Levitt.

2010. “Law from Below: Women’s Human Rights and Social Movements in New York City.”  Co-authored with Peggy Levitt, Mihaela Serban Rosen, and Diana H. Yoon.  Law and Society Review 44 (1):101- 128.

2010.  “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas.”  Co-authored with Setha Low.  In Current Anthropology, special issue on Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas. Wenner Gren Symposium Supplement 2.  co-edited with Setha Low.  Vol. 51, Number S2: 1-24.


Current News / Projects
Updated July 2010

After three years as Director of the Law and Society Program, I will move full time into the Anthropology Department in the Fall 2010.  I am on sabbatical 2010-2011 and will be in Boston as a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program of the Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Anthropology Department.  I will pursue my current research on the use of numerical and ranking indicators in global governance.  This NSF-funded project focuses on the construction and data collection efforts for three global indicators:  human rights indicators for the committees monitoring human rights treaties, violence against women surveys, and the US State Department Trafficking in Persons indicator.  Studying each of these initiatives means attending international meetings, interviewing those who create and use them, and tracking their historical evolution through documents of conferences and programs.  I am exploring what it means to use quantitative, comparative, non-contextualized measures as ways of understanding compliance with human rights standards instead of narratives with history and context.  I am also asking who decides how to measure these concepts and who collects the data. 

This new project on human rights indicators grows out of my earlier research on women’s human rights and the process of vernacularization.  I am taking a governmentality perspective on the rise of indicators in the area of global governance, asking what kinds of knowledge they produce, how they affect decisions, and how the use of this kind of knowledge changes the power dynamics of decision-making.  I hypothesize that the use of indicators as a form of knowledge places power in the hands of technical experts, who often come from the global North.   This is a new development in the human rights field, but it follows a vast expansion of this form of knowledge in economic development and health.  

The project includes two in-depth ethnographic studies done by Anthropology graduate students. In Tanzania, Summer Wood examined the processes of data collection and pilot testing of an indicator for child rights designed to assist the committee monitoring the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  In India, Vibhuti Ramachandran tracked the processes by which data on anti-trafficking efforts and accomplishments in India is gathered for the US State Department.   Jessica Shimmin, a doctoral student in the Media, Culture, and Communication program, spent the past year as a research assistant helping me track down background information on these and other indicators.

In 2010, I was awarded the J.I. Staley Prize of the School of Advanced Research for my book, Human Rights and Gender Violence (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).   In 2008, the American Anthropologist ran a series of three reviews and my commentary on that book.  Since that book came out, I have published another one called Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwells 2009).  This is the first title in a Wiley-Blackwell series on Engaged Anthropology.  It is designed for courses and offers a broad overview of major issues and the relevance of anthropological theory to the problem.  I had considerable help in preparing it, including good research by Amali Ibrahim.   This year Setha Low and I edited a collection of essays on engaged anthropology, which will be published as a special issue of Current Anthropology in fall 2010. 

I gave a substantial number of lectures last year, including the Distinguished Lecture of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.  I also gave lectures at  University College London, Univ. of Pittsburgh,  Yale Law School and Anthropology Department,  John Jay College, Boston College,  Stanford Law School, Stanford Archeology Center, Univ. of Oregon Law School,  George Mason University,  NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, University of Connecticut,  Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center, and Brown International Advanced Research Institute.  I also spoke at the conferences of the AAA, International Studies Association, American Society of International Law, Law and Society Association, and Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.   In August 2009, I was part of a joint Wenner Gren/School of American Research Conference in Santa Fe on Corporate Lives.  This year I lectured at American University, Emory University, Univ. of Toronto, UCLA, Univ. of Connecticut, Arizona State University, Univ. of Wisconsin/Madison, NYU School of Law, the World Bank, the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Columbia, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy as well as at the AAA and Law and Society Association conferences.

I was elected President-elect of the American Ethnological Society in 2009, and will become president in 2011.   I am also on the board of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropology.  Last year, I finished three years chairing the Committee on Scientific Communication of the AAA Executive Board, which involved overseeing the transition of the AAA publications program from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell.   I received the 2008 President’s Award of the American Anthropological Association for my service to the association.   Although I will be on leave in 2010-2011, I plan to keep contact with graduate students and the department during the year.