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.

Abstract

The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in 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 discursive politics of 1990s. That decade, which marks end of Cold War, stands as critical transition in policy from New Deal to neoliberal approach to inequities in U.S. society that many Americans considered to have been resolved through judicial and legislative initiatives of earlier decades. By time Soviet Union imploded at end of 1980s, global shifttoward neoliberal policies was already underway. Beginning with presidential veto of Civil Rights Act of 1990, political pluralization of neoliberalism in United States gained momentum and became legislative status quo. In this book, Greenhouse shines light on that process by successfully placing in dialogue U.S.-based ethnographic community studies, fiction, and sociolegal studies published (or republished) in 1990s.In first half of book, Greenhouse sets out interlocking themes of book and provides guide for her close textual analysis of exemplars in each genre that follow. The first chapter grapples with that, although most explicitly addressed in anthropology, also roiled other academic fields-how best to respond to elision of race and class that was deemed necessary by lawmakers as they put policies in place advocating personal over governmental responsibility for wellbeing of people living in United States. Often expressed as question of relevance, with scholars divided between Foucauldian theories of subjectivity... and Marxian theories of class, Greenhouse explains that U.S. ethnographies of 1990s bridged that divide in an effort to address minority identities emergent from local/translocal relations (41). In her view, therefore, construing as solely epistemological (i.e., how writers of ethnographies represent themselves in relation to those whose lives serve as basis for their writing) tended to conceal extent to which they were political battles in more usual sense of term (44). One solution to false conundrum of relevance was production of artful experiments in U.S. ethnography that reflected a deep ambivalence over power of law to create social change (44).The second chapter then argues that of solutions became an implicit template for writing about how new political mainstream made identity central to market-based social reform while denying equality of access to 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 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 prologue, main text, and epilogue or envoi of their books, Greenhouse argues that narrative code of ethnographic community studies of 1990s is best read as allegorical, employing fictional qualities suited for each author's sensibility as to limits of actual political and legal institutions (111).The centerpiece of book consists of two especially engaging chapters (5 and 6) that first focus on how texts are structured by discourse of solutions, defined as the promise and limits of aligning social description with discourse of political debate (142), and then explores use of first-person testimony as exemplifying federal subjectivity as it circulates across sociolegal studies, fiction, and ethnography (176). …