Contrarian Anthropology

Laura Nader is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work. Her most recent publication is What the Rest Think of the West – Since 600 AD (University of California Press, 2015). In 1995, the Law and Society Association awarded her the Kalven Prize for distinguished research on law and society. Nader is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained From Studying UpChapter 2. Barriers to Thinking New about EnergyChapter 3. The Vertical Slice: Child-Rearing and ChildrenChapter 4. A User Theory of Law: Fourth Annual Alfred P. Murrah LectureChapter 5. The Subordination Of Women In Comparative PerspectiveChapter 6. The ADR Explosion: Implications of Rhetoric in the Legal ReformChapter 7. Post-Interpretive AnthropologyChapter 8. Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of WomenChapter 9. From Legal Process to Mind ProcessingChapter 10. Civilization and its NegotiationsChapter 11. Coercive Harmony: The Political Economy of Legal ModelsChapter 12. The Three-Cornered Constellation: Magic, Science, and Religion RevisitedChapter 13. The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on AnthropologyChapter 14. Postscript on the Phantom Factor: More Ethnography of AnthropologyChapter 15. Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of PowerChapter 16. Pushing the Limits: Eclecticism on PurposeChapter 17. In a Woman’s Looking Glass: Normative Blindness and Unresolved Human Rights IssuesChapter 18. Crime as a CategoryChapter 19. Breaking the Silence: Politics and Professional AutonomyChapter 20. Iraq and DemocracyChapter 21. Law and the Theory of Lack: The 2005 Rudolph B. Schlesinger Lecture on International and Comparative LawChapter 22. Promise or Plunder? A Past and Future Look at Law and DevelopmentChapter 23. What the Rest Think of the West: Legal DimensionsChapter 24. The Words We Use: Justice, Human Rights and the Sense of InjusticeChapter 25. Vengeance, Barbarism, and Osama Bin Laden: Full CircleChapter 26. Three Jihads—Islamic, Christian, and JewishChapter 27. The Anthropologist, the State, the Empire and the “Tribe:” New Dimensions from Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam. (Brookings Institution Press, 2013)Chapter 28. Whose Comparative Law? A Global PerspectiveIndex

“Laura Nader has been one of American anthropology’s leading figures since the 1960s...She is one of the founders of legal anthropology, but also has been a profound, highly documented, loyal, and liberal voice throughout  the decades. With this collection of essays, she gives an interesting overview of the topics she has been working on.... Laura Nader continues [her] line of research, superbly. Her book must be read.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)“The book works as a reminder of how the discipline has travelled over the past decades. It also reminds us of anthropology's traditional strength as a generalist discipline, a tradition that Nader fears is losing its force… She shows us how to talk about the things we care about while maintaining the integrity and rigour of our research. This book acts as a model for opening up anthropology, without flinching at the generalist stance that might be required.” • Irish Journal of Anthropology“Overall, this volume reveals Nader to be a contrarian thinker who studies (and values) disputation, a legal anthropologist who studies the power differential between the governing and the governed, and a scholar who is committed to ethnography, hypothesis testing, and objectivity. Anyone interested in these topics will find this book an invaluable contribution to understanding both Nader’s life and anthropology more generally.” • Anthropological Forum“This [amazingly informative] book comprises a collection of selected essays and articles and represents a retrospective of [Laura Nader’s] career, making it a gift to the anthropological community…An outstanding book whose general value lies in the broad historical perspective that it offers: a full immersion in the development of the discipline of anthropology in the United States and its consequences and influences throughout the rest of the academic and public world…[It]should be used as a textbook in almost every course in anthropology... Every anthropologist should read this book as a guide to let indignation be the creative force of our own research and challenge not only existing hegemonic forces, but also pillared paradigms within our discipline.” • Public Anthropology