Separation of Church and State in the United States: Lost in Translation

In this article, the absence of an American equivalent to the French word laĭcité becomes an ethnographic opening to an exploration of the church-state divide in the U.S. context. Drawing on classic social theory, sociological accounts, and current events, I suggest that the constitutional separation of church and state-in addition to whatever it may mean in legal terms-also expresses a cultural proposition. Specifically, the separation of church and state posits a dual role for local communities as both the source of federal power (through representative government) and the foundation of its moral authority. The latter role can be sustained only to the extent that moral community is conceptualized as outside the state, extending to the state solely through the democratic process. The article concludes with a reflection on the politicization of moral values in the 2004 presidential election. La Conception Américaine de la Laïcité, Symposium. University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) – Paris, France, January 28, 200

Cualidades corporativas en el derecho y la sociedad: un caso de los Estados Unidos

Neoliberalism compresses state and non-state powers together in ways that pose fresh interpretive challenges for anthropologists and sociolegal scholars interested in the social and cultural significance of law. In this article, I develop a “case study” around a recent opinion of the United States Supreme Court in which these are among the issues. I examine Federal Elections Commission versus Citizens United —a case that involved the rights of corporations to spend money on federal electoral campaigns. The outcome was highly controversial in the United States, since it removed longstanding restrictions on corporate spending in the political sphere. From an ethnographic standpoint, though, the significance of the case may be less in what it allows corporations to say and do in the electoral context, than in the ways particular qualities of sociality claimed (by the Court) to be inherent in corporations are valorized and prioritized. I suggest that the protean nature of corporate qualities as defined by the Court points to a potential significance of the case to everyday life that extends to the meaning of the very distinction between law and society.La sociedad neoliberal engloba tanto poderes estatales como no estatales, de modo tal que plantea nuevos retos interpretativos a los antropólogos y sociólogos del derecho interesados en la significación social y cultural del derecho. Desarrollo aquí un “estudio de caso” en torno a un dictamen reciente del Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos en el cual esos aspectos figuran entre los temas que contempla. Examino el asunto Comisión de Elecciones Federales contra Ciudadanos Unidos [Citizens United] —un caso que implicaba el derecho de las empresas a invertir dinero en campañas electorales federales. El resultado fue altamente polémico en Estados Unidos, ya que eliminaba antiguas restricciones relativas a la inversión empresarial en la esfera política. Desde un punto de vista etnográfico, sin embargo, la relevancia del dictamen puede estar menos en lo que permite a las corporaciones decir y hacer en el contexto electoral que en el modo en que cualidades peculiares de carácter social, pretendidamente (por el Tribunal) inherentes a las empresas, son valoradas y priorizadas. Sugiero que la multiforme naturaleza de las cualidades de las empresas, tal como las define el Tribunal, apunta al significado potencial del caso para la vida cotidiana que alcanza al sentido de la propia diferenciación entre derecho y sociedad

Ethnography and Democracy: Texts and Contexts in the United States in the 1990s

In some respects, the decade of the 1990s was an anachronism even in its own times. The crossed preoccupations with posts (postmodern, postcolonial, postindustrial, post-Marxist, among others) and precedents (the impending millennium) made it paradoxically easy to miss the moment. The debates over constructionist and interpretivist approaches to ethnography and the cultural analysis of texts makes a case in point. Such theories gained widespread acceptance in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s (if always as counter-canons), but they never worked free of the persistent criticism that they lacked attention to power. What and where was this lack ? In this Essay, I will suggest that it was not in the method, but in the object of inquiry - the public sphere - as the civil rights era yielded to neoliberalism, and as the lines of confrontation took form, as both partisan divisions within the federal government and competition among the branches. Advocates and critics of constructionism and interpretivism alike took for granted these pragmatic circumstances; however, a reflexive analysis of interpretivism reveals assumptions about realism and readership (among other things) specific to the politics of that time and place. Interpretivism\u27s power for projects of cultural critique is a power of association with the textual genres, tropes, and institutional practices of legal activism and citizens\u27 movements of the previous generation - the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. This remains part of their power, but in the places in the United States where ethnographers work, the law has moved on, and its power is recognizable in interpretative ethnography primarily in traces of that association, which are evident as nostalgia, irony, and allegory, among other things

Dimensions of Rights Consciousness

Commenting on David Engel\u27s Article, this Comment responds particularly to Engel\u27s formulation of horizontal and vertical axes as a metaphor for the ways different analytical approaches to law and legal consciousness potentially yield *recombinant interpretive questions. Pursuing Engel\u27s concerns with the embeddedness of local norms and social relations in state-based and global legal processes, this Comment suggests expanding the two dimensions of Engel\u27s matrix to four, so as to highlight the relevance of social distance and temporality in the differing accounts of law he assays, and in appreciating their stakes. In so doing, this Comment situates Engel\u27s essay as a novel and timel

Prison Privatization and Inmate Labor in the Global Economy: Reframing the Debate over Private Prisons

The pragmatics of privatization offer terrain for a critical understanding of the relationship between government and business under the conditions associated with the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. Prison privatization is especially significant in this context, given the fact that—for privatization advocates and critics alike, in the United States and elsewhere—prisons represent a bellwether for broader questions about the scope of government. We review the recent history of prison privatization in the United States from the vantage point of the policy responses to the privatization movement more generally, to highlight the various factors that, over time, made private prisons iconic of the limits of government. We develop three interrelated themes: (1) prison privatization was politicized as a test of government’s scope only after a priority on limiting government was set in place as a matter of policy under the Reagan and Bush Administrations (and continued thereafter); (2) the privatization movement pressed for prison privatization prior to the mass incarcerations of the 1980’s and 1990’s, often claimed as the rationale for private prisons (i.e., to relieve state budgets from the costs of expanding prison capacity); and (3) an earlier privatization project within prisons involved governmental partnerships with businesses, as a means of financing prisons and stabilizing businesses’ profit margins through prison labor. In sum, in relation to prisons, privatization should not be seen as a necessary response to prison crowding, but a favored response to instabilities within the global economy. What, then, is the problem with prison privatization? We read the private prison debate as pointing to larger questions of public responsibility and the government’s role in mediating the effects of the global economy on the conditions of life, labor and citizenship, inside and outside prison walls

Prison Privatization and Inmate Labor in the Global Economy: Reframing the Debate over Private Prisons

The pragmatics of privatization offer terrain for a critical understanding of the relationship between government and business under the conditions associated with the globalization of neoliberal capitalism. Prison privatization is especially significant in this context, given the fact that—for privatization advocates and critics alike, in the United States and elsewhere—prisons represent a bellwether for broader questions about the scope of government. We review the recent history of prison privatization in the United States from the vantage point of the policy responses to the privatization movement more generally, to highlight the various factors that, over time, made private prisons iconic of the limits of government. We develop three interrelated themes: (1) prison privatization was politicized as a test of government’s scope only after a priority on limiting government was set in place as a matter of policy under the Reagan and Bush Administrations (and continued thereafter); (2) the privatization movement pressed for prison privatization prior to the mass incarcerations of the 1980’s and 1990’s, often claimed as the rationale for private prisons (i.e., to relieve state budgets from the costs of expanding prison capacity); and (3) an earlier privatization project within prisons involved governmental partnerships with businesses, as a means of financing prisons and stabilizing businesses’ profit margins through prison labor. In sum, in relation to prisons, privatization should not be seen as a necessary response to prison crowding, but a favored response to instabilities within the global economy. What, then, is the problem with prison privatization? We read the private prison debate as pointing to larger questions of public responsibility and the government’s role in mediating the effects of the global economy on the conditions of life, labor and citizenship, inside and outside prison walls

Dimensions spatio-temporelles du pluralisme juridique

Dimensions spatio-temporelles du pluralisme juridiqueLe champ du pluralisme juridique confronte les chercheurs à des questions de définition et de conceptualisation dont la récurrence est soutenue en partie par des problèmes de comparaison irrésolus en anthropologie juridique. Cet essai suggère que les énoncés conventionnels du pluralisme juridique sont marqués et limités par les conceptions occidentales du droit et plaide pour un renouvellement conceptuel multi-orienté par la distinction sociale et juridique dans le monde. Nous le faisons en juxtaposant des configurations de la différence socio-juridique organisées autour de la temporalité, de l'espace et d'autres dimensions de l'expérience sociale.Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Legal PluralismLegal pluralism as a field of inquiry has consistently posed scholars with interesting problems of definition and conceptualization, in part because it brings to the foreground unresolved comparative problems in the anthropology of law. This essay suggests that conventional formulations of legal pluralism are structured and limited by Western conceptualizations of law, and proposes that comparative approaches might be renewed by examining the multiple conceptualizations of social difference and legal pluralism that the world offers. The essay juxtaposes configurations of sociolegal difference organized around temporality, space, and other dimensions of experience