Current Table of Contents

• Technologies of Knowledge Production: Law, Ethnography, and the Limits of Explanation
  
• 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 central to the "sovereign time" that contemporary Hopi law instantiates for the Hopi Nation, but also stand in a complex relationship to the temporalities generated by the "storied moments" of Hopi litigants' tradition discourses. The effect is that these traditions get legally framed as sometimes near to, sometimes far from, the lives and times of Hopi people today. In conclusion, it will be suggested that similar tensions of norm and fact resound in certain critical assessments of anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those that focus on the implicit orientations to time and temporality that rest at the heart of ethnography's representational practices and the authority they generate. [time; tradition; law; interdiscursivity; Hopi]
• "At the Time She Was a Man": The Temporal Dimension of Identity Construction
  This article examines the temporal elements of identity construction, drawing parallels between the construction of ethnographic, legal, and personal identities. The article presents a case of transsexual identity, analyzing how people reference a transsexual in order to illuminate the temporal complexity of gendered identity construction and identity in general. The study consists of a micro-analysis of scientists and lawyers talking about transsexuals in and around a legal trial, and offers a model of identity that allows for disjuncture and incongruence over time. It argues that ethnographic and legal accounts of identity rely on a negotiation between coherence and discontinuity.
• Ethnography and Cognitive Psychology: Shared Dilemmas of the Local and Unlocatable
  Is there a productive intersection between ethnographic knowledge practices and the search for perduring structures of cognition within psychological inquiry? This article employs a brief ethnography of cognitive psychological experimentation to reveal that like ethnographers, experimental psychologists engage in a complex relationship between local particulars and generalized processes. In particular, I focus on the relationship between notions of "local" space and time and "unlocatable," abstract cognitive processes to explore how psychological inquiry, like critical ethnography, is at once concerned with identifying abstract processes and intimately tied to the particulars of the research context.
• Schrödinger's Cat and the Ethnography of Law
  Drawing on research regarding undocumented immigration and transnational adoption, this essay argues that legal and ethnographic accounts retroactively instantiate potential realities that were there all along but are only made visible by official recognition. In this sense, the "field" that is at the center of ethnographic inquiry is brought into being by the activities of the ethnographer, just as the field of (un)documented bodies is brought into being by a judicial decree. At the same time, such authorizations of the real are haunted by the noise that is left behind. This noise makes itself known by its pull on official representations, pointing to the instability of our objects of study, the multidimensionality of everyday life, and the gaps and disjunctions that compel us to return to what was overlooked in order to make our ethnographies real.
• Life Stories, Law's Stories: Subjectivity and Responsibility in the Politicization of the Discourse of "Identity"
  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 recent U.S. past when race was resignified in public policy debates that clarified the emergent political dominance of the conservative movement[mdash]and then partially reclaimed with the assertion of identity as a theoretical object in anthropology and adjacent academic fields.
• Crafty Knowledges
  
• Justice at a Price: Regulation and Alienation in the Global Economy
  This article examines the normative principles that underlie efforts to regulate the global coffee market at different points in the global division of labor. I focus on three forms of regulation: local violence against coffee farmers in Honduras, fair trade consumerism, and international regulatory treaties. By comparing the local politics of Honduran coffee production to global forms of consumer activism, I bring contemporary debates about economic justice under a single analytic lens. I suggest that systematic changes in the relationship between states and nations have led alienated citizens to develop new forms of regulation outside the boundaries of the state, and that coffee frequently serves as a metaphor through which people come to terms with their place in the global economy. This metaphor ultimately rests on an alienated representation of the global system that limits the political potential of these regulatory strategies.
• Sexual Citizenship: Articulating Citizenship, Identity, and the Pursuit of the Good Life in Urban Brazil
  In this article, I examine a citizenship course held by a lesbian rights organization in Campinas, Brazil, and argue that claims for citizenship may go well beyond claims for civil rights and legal recognition and, instead, revolve around full, participatory inclusion in public life. I further argue that social actors who demand full citizenship may at the same time place demands on themselves to become what constitutes, in their view, "ideal citizens," thereby neutralizing, at least in theory, the possibility of exclusion. In probing the understandings of the ideal lesbian citizen that surfaced during the course, including those that connect full citizenship with notions of the "good life," I suggest both that these women are simultaneously capitulating to hegemonic cultural conceptions of propriety, and rewriting those conceptions by refusing the role of marginalized "other" in Brazilian society.[citizenship, identity, sexuality, activism, Brazil]
• Fleeting Dreams and Flowing Goods: Citizenship and Consumption in Havana Cuba
  This article explores the ways that consumption practices and the expectations around consumption are changing in Havana, Cuba. Drawing on studies of citizenship, I argue that consumption is a right of citizenship and, as such, has transformative power[mdash]not necessarily positive[mdash]for society and its citizens. This is especially the case when there are economic and political distinctions made about who can and cannot consume what products. Ethnography provides insights into the varying forms of consumption that Cubans encounter, and the ways that these are fragmenting socialist ideals and values, perceptions of national unity, and, ultimately, definitions of belonging and citizenship.
• Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa by Janet Roitman
  
• Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States by Sarah S. Lochlann Jain
  
• Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States by Sheila Jasanoff
  
• Pachangas: Borderlands Music, U.S. Politics and Transnational Marketing by Margaret E. Dorsey
  
• Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity edited by Dik Roth Rutgerd Boelens, and Margreet Zwarteveen
  
• Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture edited by Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenburg
  
• Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border by Sarah F. Green
  
• Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients by Monica Konrad
  
• Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa's Political Reconstruction by Heinz KlugDemocracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa by Lungisile Ntsebeza
  
• Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy edited by Bernard E. HarcourtShooters: Myths and Realties of America's Gun Culture edited by Abigail A. Kohn