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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). …

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 the first decade of the twenty-first century, the political landscape of Latin America began to shift away from what many would characterize as the dark days of neoliberalism. Scholarship on the relationship between neoliberalism and multiculturalism, which not long ago seemed to be going in circles,1 has finally pushed some of us to consider that Latin America has begun to move beyond neoliberalism into an era we might call—for lack of a better term—“post-neoliberalism.” As prima facie evidence of this, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century countries across Latin America have elected left-leaning presidents on platforms opposed to neoliberalism, and popular leaders are calling upon their followers to “fight for the people” more than at any time since mid-twentieth-century populism.