Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020).

Sally and her sister Patty attended school together, both graduating with honors in 1962 from the Westtown School, a private Quaker academy established in 1799, then attending Wellesley College together, Sally majoring in anthropology within an integrated department of sociology and anthropology. After returning to Stockholm, Hannerz sent Sally his unpublished 1970 conference paper titled "Management of Danger", which became the inspiration for Sally's doctoral project in "Dover Square", her pseudonym for the public housing project where she conducted research between March 1975 and September 1976. With a rich body of ethnographic data at hand, Sally returned to the concept of vernacularization in an article (Merry and Stern 2005) and book (Merry 2006), but her understanding of the process shifted significantly. Neither a strident critique of international human rights nor a righteous argument on its behalf, human rights vernacularization provided an empirically grounded framework for understanding the unavoidable complexities in "translating international law into local justice" (Merry 2006; see also Goodale and Merry 2007). [Extracted from the article]