Carol J. Greenhouse

Legal Pluralism and Cultural Difference

Professor Woodman’s review of recent conceptual debates in the field of legal pluralism advances the subject by making a case for viewing legal pluralism as an ethnographic field that includes state law. In so doing, he poses a fundamental challenge to the tenacious intellectual tradition shared by academic law and classic social anthropology that divides custom from law, making legal pluralists and legal centralists into contending parties. He confronts the recent genealogy of that tradition branch by branch, and concludes that if legal pluralism has anything in store for social scientists, it is not up that particular taxonomic tree.

Time's up, timed out: reflections on social time and legal pluralism

This essay connects two longstanding anthropological themes by reconsidering Durkheims distinction between social time and personal time through the lens of legal pluralism; I also turn the temporal lens the other way, to reflect on legal pluralism. Drawing on the work of the von Benda-Beckmanns, I begin by suggesting that we might look for illuminating connections between social time and legal pluralism wherever people make urgent demands of law, and wherever states turn to law as a means of social engineering. That possibility informs my essay and choice of examples, all from the United States. First, I review two major pieces of social legislation that were explicit in their social engineering goals. Next, I consider the temporalities inscribed in the eligibility requirements for social programs set up under the broad terms of those acts. In the conclusion, I return to the question of how social time and legal pluralism might be mutually informing in ways that shed fresh light on both themes – blurring the line between social time and personal time, and considering legal pluralism as extending to the interrelation of memberships and subjective attachments.

Unexpected Properties: Strathern on the Relation of Law and Culture

This article takes up Marilyn Strathern’s formulation of a law/culture ‘duplex’ – her term for the complementarity of anthropology and law as means to each other’s ends. She draws attention to the limitations of the duplex, and urges us to consider ethnography as (in part) a project of unwinding its entwinement. As a step toward that end, the article returns to classic texts by Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski – texts that were foundational to the emergence of anthropology, and to the establishment of law as an object of study for the social sciences. Re-read in light of Strathern’s insight, what has been widely taken as their relativism emerges instead as their defense of political community as a subject for ethnography, and (accordingly) the basis for a theoretical check on law conceived globally – within states or as colonial overrule. The article concludes with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of that position.

Judgment and the Justice: An Ethnographic Reading of the Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was President Obama’s first nominee to the United States Supreme Court. She was confirmed by the Senate after three days of hearings in July, 2009 – and three months of partisan contention focused in part over her so-called “wise Latina” speech years earlier. My interest in the hearings is two-fold: first, in the question of how Sotomayor’s opponents tied the question of her particular judicial qualifications to her self-identity; and second, in the related question of how they worked minority identity more generally into a question of legitimacy. I focus on Republican opposition in the hearings, since Democrats – assured by their numerical majority in Congress at that time – engaged the nominee primarily in reaction to Republican challenges. My thesis is that the Republican performance was keyed to an oppositional discourse in which both the form and content of language were politicized in ideological terms – terms that ascribe a particular significance to race as a form of alienated solidarity.

State, Power, Anarchism

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p.

Lear and Law's Doubles: Identity and Meaning in a Time of Crisis

35.00. The book under discussion is James C. Scotts latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scotts earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x). In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”? —Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts: The Discursive Arts of Neoliberal Legitimation

Legal consciousness is vulnerable to sudden and profound change, even when there is no disruption to social or administrative routine. Such dilemmas pose problems that are at once hermeneutic, pragmatic and textual involving issues of recognition, decision making, agency, representation and discursive management, among other things. In this essay, I explore these issues by drawing on mixed media and genres comparative ethnography (from the margins of neoliberalism), current events (the Bush administrations case for war in Iraq and the campaign to ban same-sex marriage), and literary text (Shakespeares King Lear). Reading across these sources, my purpose is to advance the case for taking the literariness of state power seriously as a register in which core propositions about the relationship between legitimacy and democratic accountability can be asserted and contested through the language of everyday life.