Interdisciplinarity is a delicate achievement. We learned this some years ago when the Program in Law and Society at New York University collapsed. News of the administration's reluctance to continue its support of the Program trickled down to us as graduate students in fall 2009. At the time, the Program's Director (and our advisor) was Sally Merry.

Universities often celebrate interdisciplinarity as a strategy to encourage productive scholarly exchange. But those of us familiar with the machinations of bureaucracy know the difficulties that come from programs jointly funded by two schools and the transient deans who administer them (in this case, the New York University School of Law and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). Even in the best of times, different ways of knowing can appear incommensurate. For interdisciplinary zones to flourish, they need more than a shared set of interests and a commitment to scholarly production through probing research questions. They require scholars dwelling in such spaces to be normatively flexible, epistemologically curious, and determinedly dubious of singular claims to interpretive authority. Along with Sally, we struggled at the time to sustain this interdisciplinary aporia, even if in the end the Program succumbed to forces beyond our influence. Nonetheless, ever the intrepid explorer, Sally continued to plot paths of interdisciplinary inquiry, cultivating new intellectual communities along the way through her consummate stamina, inquisitiveness, and generosity.

As her graduate students, we learned from Sally that the challenges of interdisciplinarity are not only institutional. They are also intellectual. Through her example, we came to know that interdisciplinary scholarship requires a mode of engagement unlike more traditional academic pursuits: reading widely, opening oneself up to a variety of intellectual perspectives, embracing heterogeneity if not ambiguity, and doing what Sally did best—translating knowledge across disciplines on multiple scales. Indeed, translation is not only a concept that Sally developed for sociolegal analysis. It is also a practice bridging theory and method that she cultivated throughout her career, even if unknowingly in its early days.

One of the defining intellectual experiences of Sally's early career was her participation in the Amherst Seminar. Born from the Law and Society Association meeting in 1980, the Amherst Seminar on Legal Ideology and Legal Process brought together the disparate traditions of anthropology, political science, and sociology. Convening for more than 10 years, the Amherst Seminar pivoted away from examining the “gaps” between law and justice and instead developed a constitutive approach critical of the relationship between law, power, and lived experience. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, these scholars produced a new interdisciplinary toolkit, consisting of such new concepts as legal culture, legal consciousness, legal ideology, and legal pluralism. Although these concepts now reside in the vernacular of sociolegal studies, at the time they challenged dominant epistemologies through an interpretive and interdisciplinary approach to sociolegal analysis. Sally made seminal contributions to this field, authoring key articles that helped to sort out conceptual distinctions and to sharpen our categories of understanding.

Sally's engagement with interdisciplinary legal analysis developed in the 1980s when she took on the study of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), then a field of intense debate. At the time, not only was legal anthropology marginal within the discipline, so too was anthropological research in the United States. Working from the margins, Sally authored an essay that attempted to explain why the study of domestic legal reform was relevant for anthropology and why anthropology was relevant for projects of legal reform. By translating to nonspecialists why legal anthropology mattered, Sally argued that through “a holistic, legal pluralist model of anthropology, one can move beyond the question of the effectiveness of alternative modes of dispute resolution to ask what they mean for our society and how they will both change and be changed by the social structure with which they mesh” (1984, 283).

In Getting Justice and Getting Even (1990) Sally did just that. Based on research she conducted with sociologist Susan Silbey, Sally examined why the working poor in New England turned to courts to resolve disputes. Through her clear‐eyed ethnographic prose, Sally illustrated the incongruity between the way everyday litigants presented their problems to the court and the way those same problems were translated into legal categories that could be mediated. At a time when poor communities were gaining unprecedented access to justice through the courts, she found that working‐class people's legal consciousness was shaped by a belief that they could turn to law to project their rights and resist the informal social control embedded within their communities. Yet to their disappointment, she revealed how processes of mediation reframed their problems into cases that did not match their expectations of legal entitlements, instead reentrenching social control, this time by the state.

By 1994, when she gave her Presidential address to the Law and Society Association, she had developed a novel understanding of the relation between law and culture. She explained to the audience that the “constitutive power of law and a broad definition of its cultural effectivity and representational power suggest the importance of research on the cultural meanings produced by law in the habitual, possibly resistant, practices of everyday life” (Merry 1995: 25). Sally wove this core insight into her anthropologically informed study on legal reform, consistently demonstrating how such projects were shaped by assumptions, values, and norms of conduct that were themselves culturally embedded. This approach was necessarily interdisciplinary in scope, just as it was an invitation to engage in ethnographic questions that located her interlocutors within cultural fields they could never fully escape.

Sally deepened these insights in Colonizing Hawai'i (2000). New to Sally's repertoire at this time was the introduction of scale. Although the book might have taken as its case study the social life of law in a small Hawai'ian town, Sally recognized that the larger processes of colonialism, capitalism, and Christianity enveloped it. The local and the global could no longer be separated as distinct domains. Her approach dovetailed with the day's scholarly interest in globalization, but it added a historical dimension based in US imperialism. Even so, scale was not only a matter of place. It was also a matter of law, understood as both an institutional structure and a system of meaning. “The cultural power of law,” to borrow her subtitle claim, implies that law became a site of dominance and resistance for Hawai'ian subjects negotiating how to manage family, sexuality, marriage, the body, and the like in the fractured world characteristic of the civilizing process.

In Colonizing Hawai'i, Sally was explicit: long held anthropological definitions of culture when treated as static, stable, coherent, bounded were inadequate to the task of the study of law (2000: 28). By the time of her next book, Human Rights and Gender Violence (2006), Sally developed for the first time more fully the idea that legal culture was a matter of translation. Sally intervened in debates among human rights lawyers that cited local culture—that is, tradition—as the cause of human rights violations against women. She insisted that human rights activists and lawyers were themselves embedded within a culture of human rights, analyzing human rights activists as cultural translators that bring with them their own culture as they seek to vernacularize human rights categories into local contexts. In doing so, she revealed both the ideologies embedded within human rights discourse and illuminated why some local contexts might resist human rights categories. Just as in her study of ADR, she illuminated why technologies of law and legal reform when viewed outside of culture are bound to encounter friction and potentially reproduce power relations.

By the time she developed what would become her final major scholarly project, translation had become a core concept in the very field she had helped to build. Working with Benedict Kingsbury and Kevin Davis at NYU Law, Sally helped secure a major grant from the National Science Foundation to study the development and use of indicators to promote human rights enforcement. By design, the project included anthropologists, lawyers, and other scholars from other disciplines who had adopted each other's methods of inquiry. In addition to numerous articles and a path‐breaking monograph she authored on the subject, the indicators project spawned three additional edited volumes that assembled junior and senior scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.

Sally's own book, The Seduction of Quantification (2016), traced the rise of what she called “indicator culture,”or the translation of complex knowledge into numbers and statistical forms of representation. Through her empirical study of the construction of indicators on violence against women and human trafficking, she illustrates how their simplicity can be used to bring attention to issues that might otherwise be ignored. But she also demonstrates how indicators risk oversimplifying issues by neglecting the social and cultural contexts of human rights implementation. Indicators, she argues, ultimately create the world they aspire to measure. As indicators become an increasingly powerful form of governance, created by experts and bureaucrats far from the public eye, she shows how on‐the‐ground ethnographic inquiry remains critical for grasping the operation of power in the contemporary world.

Sally's work reflects the very best of sociolegal scholarship. As she showed us, sociolegal studies is itself an ambitious project of translation—one that we should not take for granted. Sally gifted us not only with her scholarship, but also with a model for how to engage with disciplines outside our own to better understand legal phenomena by talking to—rather than past—one another. Unselfish, patient, curious, open‐minded, this mode of scholarly practice is paramount to cultivating the intellectual communities we wish to inhabit in the very interdisciplinary institutions we extol.

跨学科是一项微妙的成就。几年前，纽约大学法律与社会计划崩溃了，我们才知道这一点。有关政府不愿继续支持该计划的消息，在2009年秋季以研究生的身份传给了我们。当时，该计划的主任（和我们的顾问）是萨利·梅里。

大学通常将跨学科性作为鼓励生产性学术交流的一种策略。但是我们这些熟悉官僚主义手段的人都知道，由两所学校和管理它们的临时院长共同资助的计划（在这种情况下，是纽约大学法学院和艺术与科学研究院）共同带来的困难。 。即使在最好的时候，不同的认识方式也会显得不相称。为了使跨学科区域蓬勃发展，他们不仅需要共同的兴趣爱好，而且还需要通过探索研究问题来致力于学术研究。他们要求居住在这样的空间中的学者必须规范灵活，认识论上好奇，并坚决怀疑对解释权的单一主张。和莎莉一起 尽管当时该计划最终屈服于我们无法控制的力量，但我们当时仍在努力维持这种跨学科的空洞症。尽管如此，萨利还是一个勇敢的探险家，她继续绘制跨学科探究的道路，并通过其精湛的毅力，好奇心和慷慨大方培养了新的知识分子。

作为她的研究生，我们从Sally那里了解到，跨学科的挑战不仅是制度上的。他们也是知识分子。通过她的例子，我们知道跨学科的学术研究需要一种参与模式，这与传统的学术追求不同：广泛阅读，开放各种知识观点，拥抱异质性（如果不是模棱两可的话）以及做Sally做得最好的事情-翻译知识跨多个领域的学科。确实，翻译不仅是Sally为社会法律分析发展的概念。即使在不知不觉中，这也是她在整个职业生涯中培养的一种实践桥梁理论和方法。

Sally早期职业生涯中定义性的知识经历之一是她参加Amherst研讨会。出生于1980年的法律与社会协会会议，关于法律思想和法律程序的阿默斯特研讨会汇集了人类学，政治学和社会学的不同传统。召开了十多年的会议，阿默斯特研讨会不再关注法律与正义之间的“鸿沟”，而是提出了一种批判性的方法来批评法律，权力和生活经验之间的关系。通过跨学科的对话，这些学者产生了一个新的跨学科工具包，其中包括法律文化，法律意识，法律意识形态和法律多元化等新概念。尽管这些概念现在存在于社会法学研究的地方，当时，他们通过解释性和跨学科的社会法律分析方法挑战了主流认识论。萨利（Sally）在这一领域做出了开创性的贡献，撰写了一些关键文章，这些文章有助于理清概念上的区别并加强我们的理解类别。

Sally从事跨学科法律分析的工作是在1980年代进行的，当时她从事替代争议解决（ADR）的研究，此后是一个激烈的辩论领域。当时，法律人类学不仅在该学科中处于边缘地位，在美国的人类学研究也是如此。萨利从边缘开始写了一篇文章，试图解释为什么国内法律改革研究与人类学相关，以及人类学为什么与法律改革项目相关。通过向非专家解释法律人类学为何如此重要，萨莉辩解说，通过“人类学的整体，法律多元论模型，1984年，283页）。

在获得正义和获得平衡（1990）Sally就是这样做的。根据她与社会学家苏珊·西贝（Susan Silbey）进行的研究，萨莉（Sally）研究了为何新英格兰的工作穷人求助于法院解决纠纷。萨莉通过她的民族志散文，阐明了日常诉讼人向法院提出问题的方式与将这些问题转化为可以调解的法律类别之间的不一致。在贫困社区正通过法院获得前所未有的司法救助的时候，她发现工人阶级的法律意识是基于这样的信念，即他们相信可以诉诸法律来投射自己的权利并抵制其社区内的非正式社会控制。令他们失望的是

到1994年，当她向法律与社会协会发表主席演说时，她对法律与文化之间的关系有了新的认识。她向听众解释说：“法律的构成权及其对文化效力和代表权的广泛定义表明，研究法律在日常生活的习惯性，可能抗拒性实践中产生的文化含义的重要性”（Merry 1995） ：25）。萨利（Sally）将这种核心见解编织进了她关于法律改革的人类学知识的研究中，始终如一地展示了这些项目是如何被本身具有文化底蕴的假设，价值观和行为规范所塑造的。这种方法在范围上必然是跨学科的，

萨利（Sally）在殖民夏威夷（2000）中加深了这些见解。）。萨利（Sally）的最新曲目是引入规模。尽管该书可能以案例研究夏威夷一个小城镇的法律社会生活为例，但萨莉认识到殖民主义，资本主义和基督教的大发展笼罩了它。本地和全局不再可以划分为不同的域。她的方法与当今学者对全球化的兴趣相吻合，但它增加了以美帝国主义为基础的历史意义。即便如此，规模不仅仅是地方问题。这也是一个法律问题，被理解为制度结构和意义系统。借用她的副标题要求时，“法律的文化力量”意味着法律已成为夏威夷人在如何管理家庭，性，婚姻，身体，

在《殖民夏威夷》中，莎莉很明确：长期被认为是静态的，稳定的，连贯的，有界的人类学文化定义不足以从事法律研究（2000：28）。在她的下一本书《人权与性别暴力》（2006年），萨莉（Sally）首次更全面地提出法律文化是翻译问题的想法。萨利（Sally）干预了人权律师之间的辩论，辩论中将当地文化（即传统）视为侵犯妇女人权的原因。她坚持认为，人权活动家和律师本身是嵌入人权文化中的，分析了人权活动家是文化翻译者，他们将自己的文化带入了当地，试图将人权类别本地化。在这样做时，她揭示了人权话语中所包含的两种意识形态，并阐明了为什么某些地方背景可能抵制人权类别。就像她对ADR的研究一样，

到她制定最终的主要学术项目时，翻译已成为她帮助建立的领域的核心概念。Sally与纽约大学法学院的本尼迪克特·金斯伯里（Benedict Kingsbury）和凯文·戴维斯（Kevin Davis）合作，帮助获得了美国国家科学基金会的一项重大拨款，以研究促进人权执法的指标的开发和使用。通过设计，该项目包括人类学家，律师和其他学科的学者，他们采用了彼此的研究方法。除了她撰写的有关该主题的大量文章和开创性的专着之外，指标项目还产生了三本额外的编辑著作，这些著作汇集了来自各个学科背景的初级和高级学者。

Sally自己的书《量化的诱惑（2016）追溯了她所谓的“指标文化”的兴起，或将复杂知识转化为数字和统计形式的表示形式。通过对关于暴力侵害妇女和人口贩运的指标的构建的实证研究，她说明了如何利用其简单性来引起人们对本来可以忽略的问题的关注。但是她也证明了指标如何通过忽视人权实施的社会和文化背景而冒险过分简化问题。她认为，指标最终创造了他们渴望衡量的世界。随着指标变得越来越强大，由远离公众视野的专家和官僚创建了一种治理形式，她展示了实地人种学调查对于掌握当代世界的权力运作仍然至关重要。

萨莉的作品反映了最好的社会法律奖学金。正如她向我们展示的那样，社会法律研究本身就是一个雄心勃勃的翻译项目，我们不应将其视为理所当然。Sally不仅凭借她的奖学金为我们提供了礼物，而且还为我们提供了一种模式，该模式用于通过与我们自己（而不是过去）互相交谈来与我们自己以外的学科进行交流，从而更好地理解法律现象。这种无私，耐心，好奇，开放的态度，这种学术实践模式对于我们希望居住在我们所崇尚的跨学科机构中的知识分子社区至关重要。