International scholars offer ethnographic analyses of the relations between transnationalism, law, and culture The recent surge of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States is widely perceived as evidence of ongoing challenges to the policies and institutions of globalization. But as editors Carol J. Greenhouse and Christina L. Davis observe in their introduction to Landscapes of Law, the appeal to national culture is not restricted to the ethno-nationalisms of the developing world outside of industrial democracies nor to insurgent groups within them. The essays they have collected in this volume reveal how claims of national culture emerge in the pursuit of transnationalism and, under some circumstances, become embedded within international law. The premise that there is inherent tension between nationalism and globalism is misleading. Whether asserted explicitly as state sovereignty or implicitly as cultural community, claims of national culture mediate how governments assert their interests and values when engaging with transnational law. Landscapes of Law demonstrates how nationalism operates in the contested zone between borderless capital and bordered states. Drawing from the fields of anthropology, international relations, law, political science, and sociology, the book's international contributors examine the ways in which claims of national differences are produced within transnational institutions. Insights from case studies across a wide range of topics reveal how such claims may be worked into policy prescriptions and legal arrangements or provide ad hoc bargaining chips. Together, they show that expressions of national culture outside of state boundaries consolidate claims of sovereignty. The contributors offer innovative frameworks for analyzing the relationships among transnationalism, law, and cultural claims at various levels and scales. They demonstrate how overlapping communities use law to define borders and shape relationships among actors rather than to generate a single social ordering. Landscapes of Law traces the theoretical implications generated by an understanding of transnational law that challenges the conventional separation of individual, community, society, national, and international spaces. Contributors: Katayoun Alidadi, Tugba Basaran, Rachel Brewster, Sandra Brunnegger, Christina L. Davis, Sara Dezalay, Marie-Claire Foblets, Henry Gao, Carol J. Greenhouse, David Leheny, Mark Fathi Massoud, Teresa Rodriguez-de-las-Heras Ballell, Gregory Shaffer, Mariana Valverde.

Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011Between 1990 and 1996, the U.S. Congress passed market-based reforms in the areas of civil rights, welfare, and immigration in a series of major legislative initiatives. These were announced as curbs on excessive rights and as correctives to a culture of dependency among the urban poor--stock images of racial and cultural minorities that circulated well beyond Congress. But those images did not circulate unchallenged, even after congressional opposition failed. In "The Paradox of Relevance," Carol J. Greenhouse provides a political and literary history of the anthropology of U.S. cities in the 1990s, where--below the radar--New Deal liberalism, with its iconic bond between society and security, continued to thrive."The Paradox of Relevance" opens in the midst of anthropology's so-called postmodern crisis and the appeal to relevance as a basis for reconciliation and renewal. The search for relevance leads outward to the major federal legislation of the 1990s and the galvanic political tensions between rights- and market-based reforms. Anthropologists' efforts to inform those debates through "relevant" ethnography were highly patterned, revealing the imprint of political tensions in shaping their works' central questions and themes, as well as their organization, narrative techniques, and descriptive practices. In that sense, federal discourse dominates the works' demonstrations of ethnography's relevance; however, the authors simultaneously resist that dominance through innovations in their own literariness--in particular, drawing on diasporic fiction and sociolegal studies where these articulate more agentive meanings of identity and difference. The paradox of relevance emerges with the realization that in the context of the times, affirming the relevance of ethnography as value-neutral science required the textual practices of advocacy and art.

"Ethnography in Unstable Places" is a collection of ethnographic accounts of everyday situations in places undergoing dramatic political transformation. Offering vivid case studies that range from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Russia, and Southeast Asia, the contributing anthropologists narrate particular circumstances of social and political transformation--in contexts of colonialism, war and its aftermath, social movements, and post-Cold War climates--from the standpoints of ordinary people caught up in and having to cope with the collapse or reconfiguration of the states in which they live.
Using grounded ethnographic detail to explore the challenges to the anthropological imagination that are posed by modern uncertainties, the contributors confront the ambiguities and paradoxes that exist across the spectrum of human cultures and geographies. The collection is framed by introductory and concluding chapters that highlight different dimensions of the book's interrelated themes--agency and ethnographic reflexivity, identity and ethics, and the inseparability of political economy and interpretivism.
"Ethnography in Unstable Places" will interest students and specialists in social anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and cultural studies.

"Contributors." Eve Darian-Smith, Howard J. De Nike, Elizabeth Faier, James M. Freeman, Robert T. Gordon, Carol J. Greenhouse, Nguyen Dinh Huu, Carroll McC. Lewin, Elizabeth Mertz, Philip C. Parnell, Nancy Ries, Judy Rosenthal, Kay B. Warren, Stacia E. Zabusky

Focusing on the problem of time-the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity-Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice.Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.

Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns located in New England, the Midwest, and the South view the law, courts, litigants, and social order.

Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," Sander County, and Hopewell interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between community and rights as rival bases of society.

The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change."

Anthropologist Carol J. Greenhouse offers an ethnographic study of attitudes toward conflict and law in a predominantly white, middle-class, suburban, principally Southern Baptist community."A most stimulating book . . . .Praying for Justice is very successful in describing a people's aversion to discord by means of cultural analysis based on sensitive use of ethnographic and archival materials. . . . There is also the pure interest in figuring out a cultural system that is not of law, but that impacts on law, one that is based on justification rather than command, on participation rather than obedience, a system of handling conflict not requiring the application of human authority. . . . This book is superlative." Law and Society Review"A welcome study analyzing the ideology of Southern Baptists in a suburban community in Georgia. Greenhouse's concern is how religious beliefs provide a basis for people's ideas about justice in their social order and how conflicts or potential conflicts are overcome or avoided entirely by invoking religious doctrine. . . . Her sophisticated analysis of the data is impressive and demonstrates an understanding of Southern beliefs that few scholars have achieved." American Anthropologist"The strength of this work is in its imaginative explanation of the structural means of conflict resolution. Greenhouse goes to painstaking length to explain the Baptist response to conflict. . . . She absorbs herself in her data and maintains that delicate balance of scholar and confidant to her subjects." Contemporary Sociology"