Susan F. Hirsch

Feminist Participatory Research on Legal Consciousness

Many studies in legal anthropology examine gender relations, yet virtually absent from the literature is an engagement with the debates over feminist method that have shaped the study of gender in other disciplines (see, e.g., Harding 1987; Reinharz 1992) and in other anthropological subfields (see, e.g., Bell, Caplan, and Karim 1993; Jackson 1986; Strathern 1987). In writing about feminist method as part of a broader consideration of methods in legal anthropology, my concern is neither to rehearse debates over feminist methodology and epistemology outside the subdiscipline, nor to offer a blueprint for deploying feminist methods in legal anthropology, nor even to advocate that scholars studying gender and law should take a feminist approach to their research. Rather, by describing a research project that incorporates feminist methods—namely, a workshop on legal consciousness conducted with a feminist activist group in Tanzania—this chapter illustrates how a consideration of feminist methods might help legal anthropologists to negotiate, or at least to reflect on, several thorny issues in contemporary research: the methodological difficulties of studying legal consciousness; the problematic relationship between the researcher and research subject in ethnographic fieldwork; and the blurred boundaries between scholarship and activism, especially in sociolegal studies.

Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic ComparisonLegal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison, by JoppkeChristianTorpeyJohn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 211 pp.

ers of post-communist nonprofit organizations will also gain new insights on the cultural, legal, and financial environment of nonprofits, the varieties of their organizational structures, and the unique nature of some government-nonprofit relationships. While the book discusses a surprising range of movement tactics, it covers a more limited array of issues, countries, and research methods, which may be considered either a strength or a weakness. A seemingly disproportionate share of the ten empirical chapters (three) discuss mothering and mothers’ rights in Hungary (Fábián and Saxonberg), Poland (Hryciuk and Korolczuk), and the Czech Republic (Saxonberg). This allows the reader to assess comparatively the impact of domestic opportunity structures and dominant discourses. However, only one of these studies linked its analysis to another chapter and thus encouraged a cross-case comparison. While class, gender, ethnicity, and race were all represented in the selected cases, a chapter on the postcommunist Occupy movements and their take on challenging global capitalism, corporations, and inequality would have been a fascinating addition. The ten chapters cover seven of the twenty-two Central and Eastern European countries (Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine), but some of the case studies are comparative and thus roughly a third of the volume focuses on the Czech Republic, leaving the Baltic states unrepresented. An advantage of this editorial strategy is that it allows a deeper insight into how the political system, for instance, in Russia, shapes and is shaped by social movements employing strikingly different tactics. The case of a small neighborhood group with a penchant for internal democracy and largely peaceful tactics in Moscow (Ivanou) set in contrast with the city’s violent riots against labor migrants and their rationalization (Zakharov) left me deliciously baffled about the state of Russian civil society. It was especially interesting to read a case of uncivil society and equally enthralling to learn about social movement failures among several analyses of movement effectiveness. Adam Fagan and Indraneel Sircar explain the challenge of mobilizing around the post-materialist issue of river basin management in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country organized along ethnic-nationalist lines. Their case study and Philipp Kuntz’s study of protest failure in Serbia and Ukraine were also distinctive because they framed their analysis in comparison to other Eastern European countries as opposed to a Western ideal. Finally, most chapters in the volume use the case study methodology and manage to offer a solid description of the admirably rich data they drew on. When interviews are quoted, they enhance the analysis and the cross-cultural palette of the cases. Ondřej Cı́sař is the only one to deviate from this mold, but as editors Jacobsson and Saxonberg point out, his protest event analysis of five modes of political activism corroborates the volume’s core argument that the tactics employed by Central and Eastern European social movement groups range widely from membership-based participation to radical activism. Thus civil society is neither homogeneously weak, nor are all social movements pacified into nonprofits in Central and Eastern Europe. This book, one of the finest editorial products, will be of particular appeal to students of nonprofits, social movements, and social change.