Personal Encounters with the Work of Laura Nader

Abstract

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). …