Search

The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States. By Carol J. Greenhouse. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 328 pp. $59.95 cloth.In The Paradox of Relevance, Carol Greenhouse offers an important analysis of the discursive politics of the 1990s. That decade, which marks the end of the Cold War, stands as a critical transition in federal policy from a New Deal to a neoliberal approach to the inequities in U.S. society that many Americans considered to have been resolved through judicial and legislative initiatives of earlier decades. By the time the Soviet Union imploded at the end of the 1980s, the global shifttoward neoliberal policies was already underway. Beginning with the presidential veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, the political pluralization of neoliberalism in the United States gained momentum and became the legislative status quo. In this book, Greenhouse shines a light on that process by successfully placing in dialogue U.S.-based ethnographic community studies, fiction, and sociolegal studies published (or republished) in the 1990s.In the first half of the book, Greenhouse sets out the interlocking themes of the book and provides a guide for her close textual analysis of the exemplars in each genre that follow. The first chapter grapples with a debate that, although most explicitly addressed in anthropology, also roiled other academic fields-how best to respond to the elision of race and class that was deemed necessary by lawmakers as they put policies in place advocating personal over governmental responsibility for the wellbeing of people living in the United States. Often expressed as a question of relevance, with scholars divided between "Foucauldian theories of subjectivity... and Marxian theories of class," Greenhouse explains that U.S. ethnographies of the 1990s bridged that divide in an effort to address "minority identities emergent from new local/translocal relations" (41). In her view, therefore, construing the debate as solely epistemological (i.e., how writers of ethnographies represent themselves in relation to those whose lives serve as the basis for their writing) "tended to conceal the extent to which they were political battles in the more usual sense of the term" (44). One solution to the false conundrum of relevance was the production of "artful experiments in U.S. ethnography" that reflected "a deep ambivalence over the power of law to create social change" (44).The second chapter then argues that a "discourse of solutions" became an implicit template for writing about how the "new political mainstream made identity central to market-based social reform" while denying equality of access to the law (70). To further her argument, Greenhouse structures Chapter 3 around quotes from Congressional hearings surrounding key legislative acts on discrimination, welfare, and immigration reform. She creatively reads this legislative history as evidence of "neoliberalism's mainstreaming" (105). With this history in mind, Chapter 4 then lays out a structure of analysis that Greenhouse will use to show how textual and political analyses are intertwined. By revealing how ethnographers shiftregisters in their use of first-person singular in the prologue, main text, and epilogue or envoi of their books, Greenhouse argues that the "narrative code" of ethnographic community studies of the 1990s is best read as allegorical, employing fictional qualities suited for each "author's sensibility as to the limits of actual political and legal institutions" (111).The centerpiece of the book consists of two especially engaging chapters (5 and 6) that first focus on how texts are structured by a discourse of solutions, defined as "the promise and limits of aligning social description with the discourse of federal political debate" (142), and then explores the use of first-person testimony as exemplifying "federal subjectivity" as it "circulates across sociolegal studies, fiction, and ethnography" (176). …

In Brazilian cities, perhaps the most disturbing criminal activity is the violence perpetrated by police officers themselves. This article is an invitation and a provocation to reconsider social scientific thinking about police violence in Brazil. Illustrated by a court decision from a Northeastern city, in which a black man won a case against the state for being falsely arrested and abused by a black police officer on the grounds of racism, this article investigates three paradoxes: Brazilians fear both crime and the police; black police beat black civilians; and government officials disavow responsibility by stigmatizing the police on racial grounds. It then proposes an alternative reading of these paradoxes that opens the possibility for rethinking police reform and argues that democratization in Brazil is deeply intertwined with the future of its darkest-skinned citizens.

Reports on violence against journalists in Brazil have captured the concern of international human rights organizations. This article discusses a case involving another such concern: the use of criminal defamation laws in Brazil to punish journalists for criticizing public officials. At the same time, Brazilian media sources regularly report on crimes of racism, which most often involve derogatory name-calling and hate speech. By examining the intersection of these apparently contradictory concerns, this article sheds new light on speech rights in Brazil and the United States and argues that a comparative perspective is crucial to contextualizing and harmonizing free speech and its limitations under modern democratic constitutions. By considering the infusion of traditional notions of honor and status with post-World War II views of dignity, this article argues for a comparative consideration of how best to combat racism and whether hate speech regulation in the U.S. should be reconsidered. As such, the type of law often used to protect the powerful in Brazil could come to be used to protect the vulnerable in the United States and opens the possibility that the irony of free speech could become more than just a scholarly debate.

Personal Encounters with the Work of Laura Nader I first encountered the work of Laura Nader in the mid-1980s when I was practicing law and decided to teach my own invented version of Anthropology of Law at the local university. In my personal attempt to combine my two primary interests, law and anthropology, I assigned the collection, The Disputing Process-Law in Ten Societies (Nader & Todd 1978). The broadening of perspectives and the possibilities for comparative thinking that it provided led me to assign it again more than 10 years later for a legal anthropology class at Duke University. In that version of the course, I also showed the PBS Odyssey Series documentary, Little Injustices: Laura Nader Looks at the Law (Rockefeller 1981). This was shortly after my first engagement with Nader's ethnography, Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (1990), in a graduate course on the history of legal anthropology. Since then, I completed my dissertation, which deals with the relationship between law and identity in Brazil's semi-arid northeast in two neighboring rural villages, one recognized in 1979 as an indigenous tribe and the other recognized in 1997 as a quilombo (community of descendants of fugitive slaves), both as the result of new laws reflecting changes in government policy (French 2003). When I reread Harmony Ideology in early 2004 in preparation for the Law & Society Association panel honoring Nader, I was struck by the extent to which her approach in that ethnography resonates with contemporary research and debates situated at the intersection of law, politics, and history, including my own work. Although I do not focus on dispute resolution per se, my work is fundamentally concerned with how local political, social, and economic interests of rural communities engage with, are changed by, manipulate, and alter national law and institutions. Such matrixes of power are Nader's primary concern in both Little Injustices and Harmony Ideology. Little Injustices, which first aired in 1981 and was still a favorite of students when I used it almost 20 years later, is part of a project Nader had begun in the 1960s, enunciated in her influential essay, "Up the Anthropologist" (1969). In Little Injustices, Nader focused on how citizens understand those who shape attitudes and control the institutions that reach into every aspect of their lives. Juxtaposing the Mexican Zapotec community of Talea and its use of the local legal system with the difficulties in lodging consumer complaints in the United States and then-innovative efforts to improve such complaint mechanisms, Nader made clear the indispensable connection between citizenship and access to justice (see also Nader 1980). Democracy, at the everyday level, requires that citizens have access to institutions and decision makers. As she compared the use and expansion of complaint-handling mechanisms in the United States to the face-to-face justice and balance pursued by the Zapotecans, Nader advocated that the audience consider exercising rights of redress outside as well as within the formal legal system. Taleans worked hard to find the middle ground so as to minimize injustice to all the actors involved in a dispute. Because it is unusual for the United States to take lessons in democratic methods from rural Third World villages, Little Injustices caught the students' attention. Through an unexpected comparison, Nader clarified a key component of democracy often overlooked in both the standard discourse about elections and the grandiose representations of democracy as a system to be exported to other nations. Almost a decade later, Harmony Ideology was published. Through an ethnographically rich presentation of Talean court cases, Nader engaged with, and her work was essential to, a crucial moment in the trajectory of legal anthropological thinking in which law was actively being theorized in terms of process, power, and history (Moore 1978; Starr & Collier 1989). …

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes-law making and indigenous identity formation-is crucial to understanding how the notion of "mixed heritage" is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.

Este artigo, ao enfocar o processo de reconhecimento de uma comunidade do sertão sergipano como remanescente de quilombo, tem como objetivo discutir como os novos conceitos de quilombo, gerados no processo de reconhecimento jurídico, reconfiguram identidades sociais, num diálogo entre a história, a lei e as práticas culturais. Para tal, o presente artigo questiona teorizações dicotomizadoras, que justapõem uma identidade racial, concebida de forma essencializada, a uma identificação étnica instrumentalizadora, pretensamente construída pela comunidade, com a finalidade de obter terra e recursos. This article illustrates that new concepts of quilombo, arising from the process of legal recognition, reconfigure identities through a dialogue between history, law, and cultural practices in a community in the sertão of Sergipe. It challenges dichotomous theorizations that juxtapose essentialized racial identity against instrumental ethnic identification for the purpose of gaining land and resources.

This study examines the knowledge of HIV/AIDS among colonia residents in the Texas‐Mexican border region. Spanish and English versions of questionnaires were developed to ask a series of public health questions about HIV/AIDS knowledge. One hundred twelve colonia residents completed the questionnaire. Sixty‐two percent of the questionnaire respondents reported United States citizenship while 29 percent were Mexican nationals. Respondents answered questions about various public health dimensions of HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention. Results indicate that colonia residents need more knowledge of HIV/AIDS. For example, it is important to know the difference between being HIV infected and having AIDS. A significant number of residents lack knowledge of prevention techniques and how HIV is transmitted. The conclusion is that a culturally sensitive prevention program in both English and Spanish is necessary to prevent HIV/AIDS transmission among colonia residents in the U.S.‐Mexican border area.

This article builds on discussions about the potential benefits and difficulties with developing a universal definition of indigenous peoples. It explores the spaces made available for theorizing indigeneity by the lack of a definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007. Specifically, this article addresses the challenge presented by the diversity of groups claiming indigenous status in Brazil. To what extent do distinct cosmologies and languages that mark Amazonian Indians as unquestionably indigenous affect newly recognized tribes in the rest of Brazil who share none of the indicia of authenticity? This article theorizes how to situate these newly recognized tribes within the context of the Declaration and addresses what the Brazilian experience has to offer in providing openings for claims that might have been made through alternative means, such as land reform and international cultural heritage rights.