Remembering Aunt Sally

Abstract

First an admission. It is a not-so-well-kept secret among many of my friends and colleagues in legal anthropology that Sally Engle Merry and I are related by marriage. She is my wife Lindsey's aunt. I bring this up only because I think it has impacted my effort to write this memorial essay. It has been very hard to write, and in fact, I am only now getting to it on the deadline for its submission, September 25, 2020, just over two weeks since her passing. I think the challenge has to do with whether I should be writing about the obvious impact her tremendous scholarship has had on my own—that is write as a colleague whom she mentored, and who was lucky to call her his friend — or if I should be writing about the indelible experiences I shared with her in various family occasions, including camping trips, weddings, summer vacations, when we also talked at length about our work, the profession, and our thoughts on what anthropology is and where it was heading. Both are appropriate at this time, but of course each comes with a different kind of narrative arc, starting from one place and taking it where it goes.