Justin B Richland
Biographic Data
| ID | 96766 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Justin B Richland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Justin B |
| FAMILY NAME | Richland |
| SIGNATURE | RICHLAND J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4036-6464 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Law, Anthropology, and Their Languages
This article combines perspectives from linguistic anthropology and outsider scholarship to examine the academic discourses of law and anthropology. Inclusion of outsider scholarship is not only an issue of politics and ethics within the academy, but also a crucial corrective to limited epistemologies, ontologies, and methods within standard Eurocentric forms of analysis. We begin in Sections 1 and 2 with an overview of relevant scholarly foundat…
Part Five. Ethics and Formality
Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements
Remembering Aunt Sally
First an admission. It is a not-so-well-kept secret among many of my friends and colleagues in legal anthropology that Sally Engle Merry and I are related by marriage. She is my wife Lindsey's aunt. I bring this up only because I think it has impacted my effort to write this memorial essay. It has been very hard to write, and in fact, I am only now getting to it on the deadline for its submission, September 25, 2020, just over two weeks since her…
Jurisdictions of significance: Narrating time-space in a Hopi-US tribal consultation
In 2013, Hopi Tribal representatives met US Forest Service officials to consult on the significance of archaeological sites in the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplified the "meaningful tribal consultation" process that federal law requires US agencies to undertake with Native nations. Disagreement persists about the efficacy of such consultations and about why indigenous actors continue to participate in them. In the 2013 consultations, …
On Perpetuity: Tradition, Law and the Pluralism of Hopi Jurisprudence
A summary 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.
Dignity as (Self-)Determination: Hopi Sovereignty in the Face of US Dispossessions
In 2013, the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort began spraying artificial snow made from reclaimed wastewater on Arizona's highest peak, a place the Hopi people call Nuvatukya'ovi, “Snow-on-top-of-it.” As one of the Hopis' most sacred places, the home of the katsinam and the southwestern boundary marker of their aboriginal territory, the Hopi have fought for decades to stop development of the ski resort, which today sits on US Forest Service land. Viewi…
Discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology
The Constitution of Violence Through the Language of Law: Legal Hermenutics in Second‐Century Roman Egypt
This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, call…
Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity
Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how t…
Travels among the records: Some thoughts provoked by Government of paper
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language
Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law's territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law's social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as law's speech, new theories of jurisdiction suggest that law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (s…
Beyond Listening: Lessons for Native/American Collaborations from the Creation of The Nakwatsvewat Institute
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Justin Richland; Beyond Listening: Lessons for Native/American Collaborations from the Creation of The Nakwatsvewat Institute. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2011; 35 (1): 101–111. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.1.n…
Hopi Tradition as Jurisdiction: On the Potentializing Limits of Hopi Sovereignty
In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of Hopi political history. First, I consider the uses of tradition in the creation of the contemporary Hopi tribe through the field notes of the US agent charged with drafting the 1936 Hopi Constitution. Then I consi…
Perpetuities Against Rules: Law, Ethnography and the Measuring of Lives
The writing of culture (ethno-graphy) that has characterized the modern anthropological endeavor has come under critique for measuring the lives of Others according to its own peculiar normative and temporal logics, and then eliding the fact that it is doing so. The same is true of law, where the writing of human action gets figured in ways that always involve some un-ruly combination of legal fact and norm, and the temporal trajectories that are…
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Justin B. Richland (bio) The headlines of the March 6, 1886, edition of the Illustrated Police News, a late nineteenth-century London weekly, read “Cowed by a Woman: A Craven Red Villain Weakens in the Face of a Resolute White Heroine—Exciting Adventure in an Indian Village in Arizona.” The now famous illustration accompanying the story showed anthropologists Colonel James and Mathilda Coxe Stevenson conf…
On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review
In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo‐American peer‐reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those f…
Nuvatukya'ovi, San Francisco Peaks: Balancing Western Economies with Native American Spiritualities
The recent legal battle between the U.S. Forest Service and 13 Native American tribes, including the Hopi, concerning the San Francisco Peaks constitutes a serious threat to fundamental religious beliefs that are representative of viable cultural practices. In this study, cultural meanings ascribed to the San Francisco Peaks (Nuvatukya'ovi) as expressed in Hopi verbal and visual arts are examined in an effort to clarify the sacred nature of the S…
Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court
Arguing with Tradition is the first book to explore language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in Justin B. Richland's extensive field research on the Hopi Indian Nation of northeastern Arizona - on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore - this innovative work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence.Like many indig…
Sovereign Time, Storied Moments: The Temporalities of Law, Tradition, and Ethnography in Hopi Tribal Court
This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscursive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition regularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once centra…
Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice by Sally Engle Merry Book Editor's Note
Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the "edge" of Hopi sovereignty
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic "talk about courtroom talk," whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity-in which claims to cu…
The multiple calculi of meaning
This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practic…
"What Are You Going to Do with the Village's Knowledge?" Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court
Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal institutions that continue to employ legal processes informed by both Anglo-style adversarial notions of law and "local" notions of law, culture, and tradition. Using methods of legal discourse analysis and languag…
Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language
Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law's territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law's social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as law's speech, new theories of jurisdiction suggest that law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (s…
Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity
Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how t…
Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the "edge" of Hopi sovereignty
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic "talk about courtroom talk," whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity-in which claims to cu…
On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review
In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo‐American peer‐reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those f…
"What Are You Going to Do with the Village's Knowledge?" Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court
Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal institutions that continue to employ legal processes informed by both Anglo-style adversarial notions of law and "local" notions of law, culture, and tradition. Using methods of legal discourse analysis and languag…
Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements
Jurisdictions of significance: Narrating time-space in a Hopi-US tribal consultation
In 2013, Hopi Tribal representatives met US Forest Service officials to consult on the significance of archaeological sites in the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplified the "meaningful tribal consultation" process that federal law requires US agencies to undertake with Native nations. Disagreement persists about the efficacy of such consultations and about why indigenous actors continue to participate in them. In the 2013 consultations, …
Hopi Tradition as Jurisdiction: On the Potentializing Limits of Hopi Sovereignty
In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of Hopi political history. First, I consider the uses of tradition in the creation of the contemporary Hopi tribe through the field notes of the US agent charged with drafting the 1936 Hopi Constitution. Then I consi…
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Justin B. Richland (bio) The headlines of the March 6, 1886, edition of the Illustrated Police News, a late nineteenth-century London weekly, read “Cowed by a Woman: A Craven Red Villain Weakens in the Face of a Resolute White Heroine—Exciting Adventure in an Indian Village in Arizona.” The now famous illustration accompanying the story showed anthropologists Colonel James and Mathilda Coxe Stevenson conf…
Nuvatukya'ovi, San Francisco Peaks: Balancing Western Economies with Native American Spiritualities
The recent legal battle between the U.S. Forest Service and 13 Native American tribes, including the Hopi, concerning the San Francisco Peaks constitutes a serious threat to fundamental religious beliefs that are representative of viable cultural practices. In this study, cultural meanings ascribed to the San Francisco Peaks (Nuvatukya'ovi) as expressed in Hopi verbal and visual arts are examined in an effort to clarify the sacred nature of the S…
Sovereign Time, Storied Moments: The Temporalities of Law, Tradition, and Ethnography in Hopi Tribal Court
This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscursive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition regularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once centra…
The multiple calculi of meaning
This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practic…
Dignity as (Self-)Determination: Hopi Sovereignty in the Face of US Dispossessions
In 2013, the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort began spraying artificial snow made from reclaimed wastewater on Arizona's highest peak, a place the Hopi people call Nuvatukya'ovi, “Snow-on-top-of-it.” As one of the Hopis' most sacred places, the home of the katsinam and the southwestern boundary marker of their aboriginal territory, the Hopi have fought for decades to stop development of the ski resort, which today sits on US Forest Service land. Viewi…
Perpetuities Against Rules: Law, Ethnography and the Measuring of Lives
The writing of culture (ethno-graphy) that has characterized the modern anthropological endeavor has come under critique for measuring the lives of Others according to its own peculiar normative and temporal logics, and then eliding the fact that it is doing so. The same is true of law, where the writing of human action gets figured in ways that always involve some un-ruly combination of legal fact and norm, and the temporal trajectories that are…
"What Are You Going to Do with the Village's Knowledge?" Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court
Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal institutions that continue to employ legal processes informed by both Anglo-style adversarial notions of law and "local" notions of law, culture, and tradition. Using methods of legal discourse analysis and languag…
The multiple calculi of meaning
This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practic…
Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the "edge" of Hopi sovereignty
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic "talk about courtroom talk," whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity-in which claims to cu…
Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court
Arguing with Tradition is the first book to explore language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in Justin B. Richland's extensive field research on the Hopi Indian Nation of northeastern Arizona - on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore - this innovative work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence.Like many indig…
Sovereign Time, Storied Moments: The Temporalities of Law, Tradition, and Ethnography in Hopi Tribal Court
This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscursive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition regularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once centra…
Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice by Sally Engle Merry Book Editor's Note
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit
Hopi Sovereignty as Epistemological Limit Justin B. Richland (bio) The headlines of the March 6, 1886, edition of the Illustrated Police News, a late nineteenth-century London weekly, read “Cowed by a Woman: A Craven Red Villain Weakens in the Face of a Resolute White Heroine—Exciting Adventure in an Indian Village in Arizona.” The now famous illustration accompanying the story showed anthropologists Colonel James and Mathilda Coxe Stevenson conf…
On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review
In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo‐American peer‐reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those f…
Nuvatukya'ovi, San Francisco Peaks: Balancing Western Economies with Native American Spiritualities
The recent legal battle between the U.S. Forest Service and 13 Native American tribes, including the Hopi, concerning the San Francisco Peaks constitutes a serious threat to fundamental religious beliefs that are representative of viable cultural practices. In this study, cultural meanings ascribed to the San Francisco Peaks (Nuvatukya'ovi) as expressed in Hopi verbal and visual arts are examined in an effort to clarify the sacred nature of the S…
Perpetuities Against Rules: Law, Ethnography and the Measuring of Lives
The writing of culture (ethno-graphy) that has characterized the modern anthropological endeavor has come under critique for measuring the lives of Others according to its own peculiar normative and temporal logics, and then eliding the fact that it is doing so. The same is true of law, where the writing of human action gets figured in ways that always involve some un-ruly combination of legal fact and norm, and the temporal trajectories that are…
Beyond Listening: Lessons for Native/American Collaborations from the Creation of The Nakwatsvewat Institute
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Justin Richland; Beyond Listening: Lessons for Native/American Collaborations from the Creation of The Nakwatsvewat Institute. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 January 2011; 35 (1): 101–111. doi: https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.1.n…
Hopi Tradition as Jurisdiction: On the Potentializing Limits of Hopi Sovereignty
In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of Hopi political history. First, I consider the uses of tradition in the creation of the contemporary Hopi tribe through the field notes of the US agent charged with drafting the 1936 Hopi Constitution. Then I consi…
Travels among the records: Some thoughts provoked by Government of paper
Comment on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language
Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law's territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law's social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as law's speech, new theories of jurisdiction suggest that law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (s…
Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity
Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how t…
Discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology
The Constitution of Violence Through the Language of Law: Legal Hermenutics in Second‐Century Roman Egypt
This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, call…
Dignity as (Self-)Determination: Hopi Sovereignty in the Face of US Dispossessions
In 2013, the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort began spraying artificial snow made from reclaimed wastewater on Arizona's highest peak, a place the Hopi people call Nuvatukya'ovi, “Snow-on-top-of-it.” As one of the Hopis' most sacred places, the home of the katsinam and the southwestern boundary marker of their aboriginal territory, the Hopi have fought for decades to stop development of the ski resort, which today sits on US Forest Service land. Viewi…
On Perpetuity: Tradition, Law and the Pluralism of Hopi Jurisprudence
A summary 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.
Jurisdictions of significance: Narrating time-space in a Hopi-US tribal consultation
In 2013, Hopi Tribal representatives met US Forest Service officials to consult on the significance of archaeological sites in the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplified the "meaningful tribal consultation" process that federal law requires US agencies to undertake with Native nations. Disagreement persists about the efficacy of such consultations and about why indigenous actors continue to participate in them. In the 2013 consultations, …
Remembering Aunt Sally
First an admission. It is a not-so-well-kept secret among many of my friends and colleagues in legal anthropology that Sally Engle Merry and I are related by marriage. She is my wife Lindsey's aunt. I bring this up only because I think it has impacted my effort to write this memorial essay. It has been very hard to write, and in fact, I am only now getting to it on the deadline for its submission, September 25, 2020, just over two weeks since her…
Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements
Part Five. Ethics and Formality
Law, Anthropology, and Their Languages
This article combines perspectives from linguistic anthropology and outsider scholarship to examine the academic discourses of law and anthropology. Inclusion of outsider scholarship is not only an issue of politics and ethics within the academy, but also a crucial corrective to limited epistemologies, ontologies, and methods within standard Eurocentric forms of analysis. We begin in Sections 1 and 2 with an overview of relevant scholarly foundat…
Sociology (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Hopi (10 works) · History (9 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works)