Carol J Greenhouse
Biographic Data
| ID | 77467 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carol J Greenhouse |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carol J |
| FAMILY NAME | Greenhouse |
| SIGNATURE | GREENHOUSE C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-9447-9513 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 393 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Constitutional Economy in Crisis
This commentary offers ethnographic reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States , the July 2024 ruling that gave then-former President Trump and all future presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for certain categories of official conduct. Taken together, the text and context of the opinion provide an extended case study in the contemporary meanings of constitutional crisis. The Introduction discusses the conce…
Ghosting at the border
The theoretical association of an inclusive public sphere with liberal democratic governing begs a closer examination. This article pursues forms of disqualification implicit in the idea of political community as a national project, ultimately finding that the exclusion of foreigners does not begin on the far side of the US border, but well within it as an extension of other forms of alienation under the law. My ethnographic starting point is a 2…
After Dobbs
Introduction
This Is Not Normal
Interpreting American Litigiousness
Sooner or later any discussion of the role of law in the United States turns to the question of the litigiousness of Americans. Litigiousness is widely held to be an American trait, not only by allegedly less litigious ness foreigners but also among Americans themselves. This chapter is about Americans' concerns with litigiousness. I treat these concerns as a cultural self-representation of American society. Litigation is an impor tant activity i…
Documents as Ethnographic Objects
Documents interest anthropologists not just as platforms for recording and stabilizing information but also as ethnographic objects in themselves. The materiality of documents is central to new ethnographies of bureaucratic management, governance, rights claiming, and other aspects of citizenship. Ethnographers' attention to documents as objects has also yielded new insights regarding the production and consumption of documents, illuminating docu…
Law and Community in Three American Towns
Reading Durkheim in Darkness
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with major books that have influenced the authors. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, and Nicola Lacey. I have chosen Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society (1893). As for…
Citizens United, citizens divided
The US Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United largely deregulated corporations' contributions to political campaigns. Immediately and persistently controversial, the case is significant for its reasoning with respect to interests, influence, identity, and equality as registers of the public interest-conceptually fusing democracy and economy through corporations. Citizens operates on many scales, though, and its domains are not limited to ele…
The Scale(s) of Justice
Emily Grabham
Political Anthropology
The subfield of political anthropology developed out of anthropology's long‐standing engagement with politics, power, interests, and forms of contestation around the world. Political anthropology is a vibrant area of the discipline today, if no longer bounded as a distinct area of inquiry. The pervasiveness of power relations and the stakes in actually existing politics in anthropologists' ethnographic locations make political anthropology centra…
Aftershocks of Relativity
The essay pursues a rereading of Benedict's Patterns of Culture as her probing experiment in search of a temporality appropriate to her aspirations for ethnography. Read between the lines of various of her sources—works by Durkheim, Boas, Einstein, and Bergson—the originality of Patterns is its unfolding of relativity as a series of temporal formulations. In this regard, she brought her powerful ethnographic imagination to bear on the question of…
Dialectical dreams
Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. "Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73
Arbitraging anthropology
Time's up, timed out
This essay connects two longstanding anthropological themes by reconsidering Durkheim's 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 la…
Unexpected Properties
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 foundationa…
Remi Clignet, Death, Deeds, and Descendants
Remi Clignet’s classic study of inheritance in the United States, originally published in 1992, has been reissued – a welcome development for a new generation of scholars ready to appreciate the compelling yet subtle force of his argument. The book is, in effect, an argument by demonstration concerning the relevance of law in private life, the interpretive ambiguities of testacy with respect to family life, and the relevance of the study of inter…
The “State Idea” in Theory and Practice
Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn—taking up “the state idea” as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself—in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function …
Looking and Seeing, Meanwhile
Laura Gómez's meditation on race invites us to think again about where we have been and where we are headed-as a professional association, as an intellectual community, and as individual scholars. Reading these pages brings back the exhilaration of the event: the sense of hearing said something that needed saying, that was possible to say without misunderstanding. The implicit "now" in that understanding reminds us how short the history of that p…
The Paradox of Relevance
As U.S. political discourse conclusively shifted from rights to markets in the 1990s, ethnographers countered with studies of urban neighborhoods in distress, critically reworking the cultural stereotypes that popularized the market turn
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. $35.00. The book under discussion is James C. Scott's 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 …
Durkheim and Law
Recent scholarship on Durkheim draws attention to debates implicating his ideas about law, mainly in The Division of Labor in Society, but also in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Division is the better known work, and established readings—otherwise diverse—find in it a thesis about law as the expression of the collective conscience and functioning to maintain community norms. Durkheim's attention to the state in Civic Morals is often read a…
Ethnographies of Neoliberalism
What happens when citizens are refashioned as consumers? Drawing on diverse disciplines and ethnographies from five continents, this collection considers neoliberal reform from the standpoint of people's self-understandings as social and political actors
A Moment's Notice
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 sel…
Ethnography in Unstable Places
The essays in this volume explore experiential connections between political instability and social life.The contributors consider situations in which established social routines-including taken-for-granted understandings of society itself-have been altered by transformations of state power.In the absence of routines, other social connections and registers proliferate, some more productively than others.The authors' explorations of the agencies, …
Just in Time
Praying for Justice
Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts
In this article, I offer a reading of James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) from an inverted standpoint: Whereas Scott's focus is on resistance from below, mine is on resistance from above. My case study involves some of the more prominent legal and political responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001-notably the President's Military Order of November 13, 2001, establishing military tribunals for nonci…
Courting Difference
This article explores the connections between the interpretive and comparative dimensions of ideology by analyzing ethnographic data from an American town. The town is undergoing a rapid process of urbanization, and townspeople are absorbed in the analysis of the changes around them and their town's prospects as a community. The article compares interview data and courtroom observations in which local understandings are shown to be constituted in…
Looking at Culture, Looking for Rules
Anthropology at Home
Sings of quality
This article concerns the conceptual relationships among individualism, social order, and moral hierarchy in the United States. Ethnographic research in a suburban town revealed preoccupations with the links among the avoidance of overt conflict, valorization of the local "way of life," and positive moral values. In searching for a wider cultural context of these local concerns, the article considers individualism as a conflict discourse that str…
Durkheim and Law
Recent scholarship on Durkheim draws attention to debates implicating his ideas about law, mainly in The Division of Labor in Society, but also in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Division is the better known work, and established readings—otherwise diverse—find in it a thesis about law as the expression of the collective conscience and functioning to maintain community norms. Durkheim's attention to the state in Civic Morals is often read a…
Citizens United, citizens divided
The US Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United largely deregulated corporations' contributions to political campaigns. Immediately and persistently controversial, the case is significant for its reasoning with respect to interests, influence, identity, and equality as registers of the public interest-conceptually fusing democracy and economy through corporations. Citizens operates on many scales, though, and its domains are not limited to ele…
Mediation
Time's up, timed out
This essay connects two longstanding anthropological themes by reconsidering Durkheim's 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 la…
Life Stories, Law's Stories
In this essay, my focus is on the politicization of "identity" as an aspect of political competition within the U.S. government at critical moments in the modern making (and unmaking) of rights. I draw on a comparison of two textual examples: transcripts of the hearings that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and a reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Their antithetical visions of identity offer a "way in" to a particular moment in the re…
A Moment's Notice
This Is Not Normal
Fieldwork on Law
Based on a review of field-based scholarship on law published in English in 2004 and 2005, this review focuses on themes most strongly emergent across the disciplines of law and the social sciences: state regulation of the private sector, rights (individual rights, indigenous rights, and human rights), and security. These developing areas of field research show the impact of neoliberalism on the social fields of law, an impact intensified by the …
Tuning to a Key of Gladness
The author reflects on the significance of violence (the theme of the 1997 Law and Society Association's annual meeting) for sociolegal scholars, considering the changing landscapes of law and difference, especially in the contemporary United States, as well as issues of vocation and agency
After Dobbs
Dialectical dreams
Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. "Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73
Commentary
Constructive Approaches to Law, Culture, and Identity
This commentary responds to the essays by Espeland and Gooding as ethnographic studies of the cultural construction of identity with a discussion of the concept of "cultural construction." Sophocles' Antigone provides an extended illustrative example of how the poetics of identity are tied to the materiality of power. In the world of events, the concept of cultural construction is useful-as Espeland's and Gooding's essays show-as an alternative (…
Ghosting at the border
The theoretical association of an inclusive public sphere with liberal democratic governing begs a closer examination. This article pursues forms of disqualification implicit in the idea of political community as a national project, ultimately finding that the exclusion of foreigners does not begin on the far side of the US border, but well within it as an extension of other forms of alienation under the law. My ethnographic starting point is a 2…
Political Anthropology
The subfield of political anthropology developed out of anthropology's long‐standing engagement with politics, power, interests, and forms of contestation around the world. Political anthropology is a vibrant area of the discipline today, if no longer bounded as a distinct area of inquiry. The pervasiveness of power relations and the stakes in actually existing politics in anthropologists' ethnographic locations make political anthropology centra…
Unexpected Properties
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 foundationa…
Cualidades corporativas en el derecho y la sociedad
La sociedad neoliberal engloba tanto poderes estatales como no estatales, de modo tal que plantea nuevos retos interpretativos a los antropólogos y sociólogos del derecho interesados en la significación social y cultural del derecho. Desarrollo aquí un "estudio de caso" en torno a un dictamen reciente del Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos en el cual esos aspectos figuran entre los temas que contempla. Examino el asunto Comisión de Elecciones…
Teaching and Unteaching with Legal Anthropology
General and Theoretical
Nature is to Culture as Praying is to Suing
Looking at Culture, Looking for Rules
Mediation
Anthropology at Home
Praying for Justice
Courting Difference
This article explores the connections between the interpretive and comparative dimensions of ideology by analyzing ethnographic data from an American town. The town is undergoing a rapid process of urbanization, and townspeople are absorbed in the analysis of the changes around them and their town's prospects as a community. The article compares interview data and courtroom observations in which local understandings are shown to be constituted in…
Praying for Justice
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Just in Time
Contested Lives
Based on the struggle over a Fargo, North Dakota, abortion clinic, Contested Lives explores one of the central social conflicts of our time. Both wide-ranging and rich in detail, it speaks not simply to the abortion issue but also to the critical role of women s political activism
Do the natives prefer Durkheim
The Moral Order of a Suburb. M. P. BAUMGARTNER.Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and Experience among the Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge. JAMES L. PEACOCK and RUEL W. TYSON, JR.The Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition. ELLEN M. ROSENBERG
Revisiting Hopewell
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Revisiting Hopewell
Sings of quality
This article concerns the conceptual relationships among individualism, social order, and moral hierarchy in the United States. Ethnographic research in a suburban town revealed preoccupations with the links among the avoidance of overt conflict, valorization of the local "way of life," and positive moral values. In searching for a wider cultural context of these local concerns, the article considers individualism as a conflict discourse that str…
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Legal Pluralism in Industrialized Societies
Watch the Woodchopper, Wait for the Fire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Constructive Approaches to Law, Culture, and Identity
This commentary responds to the essays by Espeland and Gooding as ethnographic studies of the cultural construction of identity with a discussion of the concept of "cultural construction." Sophocles' Antigone provides an extended illustrative example of how the poetics of identity are tied to the materiality of power. In the world of events, the concept of cultural construction is useful-as Espeland's and Gooding's essays show-as an alternative (…
The Anthropology of Time
A Moment's Notice
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 sel…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Political science (41 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Law (34 works) · Law (27 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Law in Society and Culture (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (14 works)