Laura Nader

Letters to and from an Anthropologist

Laura Nader

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501752247
• eBook ISBN: 9781501752261
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

Laura Nader documents decades of letters written, received, and archived by esteemed author and anthropologist Laura Nader. She revisits her correspondence with academic colleagues, lawyers, politicians, military officers, and many others, all with unique and insightful perspectives on a variety of social and political issues. She uses personal and professional correspondence as a way of examining complex issues and dialogues that might not be available by other means. By compiling these letters, Nader allows us to take an intimate look at how she interacts with people across multiple fields, disciplines, and outlooks.

Arranged chronologically by decade, this book follows Nader from her early career and efforts to change patriarchal policies at UC, Berkeley, to her efforts to fight against climate change and minimize environmental degradation. The letters act as snapshots, giving us glimpses of the lives and issues that dominated culture at the time of their writing. Among the many issues that the correspondence in Laura Nader explores are how a man on death row sees things, how scientists are concerned about and approach their subject matter, and how an anthropologist ponders issues of American survival. The result is an intriguing and comprehensive history of energy, physics, law, anthropology, feminism and legal anthropology in the United States, as well as a reflection of a lifelong career in legal scholarship.

1

Getting Started in the Sixties

Moving from graduate school at Radcliffe College to UC Berkeley at age twenty-nine was a major transition—from young student to young faculty, from being the only female member on the ladder in the Anthropology Department to joining the UCB faculty at large, which included Berkeley’s Academic Senate. In addition, the sixties were a decade of concurrent movements: civil rights, Vietnam War protests, Native American and women’s movements, consumer movements, and environmental movements, all of which had an impact on anthropology. At the same time, law was central to all these movements: US law, international law, and independence movements worldwide all accompanied by military activities. Thus I went from Harvard and McCarthyism’s focus on communism and the red threat to Berkeley and what in hindsight were predictable movements that had been percolating during the years of right-wing US politics.

In this context my work in anthropology, the university, and the wider community got started. The letters that follow reflect much of these politics and more. Teaching was a challenge, and as noted earlier, my chair Sherwood Washburn wrote to me saying I was overdoing it on required courses, all of which made me shake up my pedagogy by having students in my law class keep complaint diaries. They were revelatory. I got to know something about the lives of my students. I was married in 1962 and had my first child in 1964 with no maternity leave, which inspired my interest in women’s rights in the United States. Margaret Mead wrote me to point out a slight inaccuracy in my comments about the status of women at Columbia University. Women faculty at UC Berkeley were few in number. We did not get equal pay, something we learned when students wrote the respective salaries on the elevator door! When after some years I was making $27,500, my male colleagues of the same range were making $55,000. Women were unable to cross the Great Hall in the Men’s Faculty Club to get to meeting rooms on the other side until the mid-1960s, although we could climb in the window to such meetings. And we did!

In the summer of 1961, with a small grant from UCLA, I worked with Shia Muslims in South Lebanon to learn about dispute settlement in villages and examined whether it was secular or religious. Professor G. E. von Grunebaum had awarded this grant, and so followed an exchange of letters with the distinguished professor. By good fortune, I spent 1963–64 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Palo Alto, allowing me space to return to Oaxaca and the mountain Zapotec of Mexico, the site of my dissertation fieldwork. There I filmed the Zapotec court, resulting in To Make the Balance.¹ Because I was pregnant, the better part of wisdom was to fly into the Sierra rather than travel by truck. Only the missionaries could fly me in, and so began a correspondence with Claude Good and Walter S. Miller, which includes letters regarding Trique linguistics. Translating the Christian Bible into indigenous languages was a central part of their missionizing, and I had spent the summer of 1962 working with the Trique to write an essay for the Handbook of Middle American Indians.² The Conference on the Ethnography of Law held at the Center for Advanced Study was expanding my network in and out of anthropology. Underneath all this was my concern over promotion and tenure. I reached out for advice, first to Sir Edmund Leach for feedback on my Zapotec law material and kinship, and later Rob Burling of Michigan’s Anthropology Department after my first monograph was harshly reviewed by Charles Leslie. Both were enormously supportive and helpful, as indicated in their letters.

My concern over anthropologists as spies and counterinsurgency in Latin America led me to write to the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and to Stephen Boggs, who was administrator of the AAA. It was during the US Army’s Project Camelot in Chile, but there was more to it than that. International conferences on law introduced me to my South Korean colleague Pyong Choon Hahm, who was more interested in Korean harmony than disputing (he unfortunately died at a young age in a plane accident), and Vilhelm Aubert, a Norwegian sociologist working on the “Lappish problem,” the Lapps being their indigenous population. Law and development movements were in full swing, especially in Ethiopia and Kenya—with new African states appearing after the wars of liberation from Western colonialism and Westerners eager to help new states develop in our own image. Legal development movements inspired lawyers to write me for advice on what it might take to move “law” to development in new states, later a cause of new problems within states between “customary law” and state law. And as my project on comparative law was initiated, my work on Zapotec law interested a broad audience beyond anthropology. Lon Fuller at Harvard Law wrote about his interest in “primitive” adjudication as it relates to “basic legal processes,” and wondered what anthropologists had to say about the subject.

The first letter in this collection from E. R. Leach was very important for me, symbolically and otherwise. He was a model for all anthropologists. He brought the concept of power into the ethnographic picture of highland Burma (relevant to the Kachin people today), he was well aware of tensions between generations, aware of class variants and their impact on the sociology of knowledge, provocative and unpredictable. In the sixties my interest was predominantly in law in other societies. I had yet to turn my interest back home, here in the United States, an interest that would blossom in the seventies with the reinventing of anthropology colleagues. But the letters tell the story.

April 23, 1961

Dear Dr. Nader,

I should have written sooner to thank you for the copy of your “Law” paper which is full of interest. You now ask for my comments—I doubt if they can really be of much value. I take it that part of your thesis is that if close kin (affinal or consanguines) take a case to law the precise subject of dispute is only part of the story—the accusation is simply a symbol for the general state of hostility. The nature of the accusation is defined by the sex and kinship status of the parties rather than by any circumstances to the alleged offense. This seems reasonable.

Roughly the position seems to be how a wife takes her husband to court when his ill-treatment of her is (by local standards) notorious and intolerable and she charges him with quite stereotypical offences. At pg. 13 you express surprise that the plaintiff usually wins; I myself find it surprising how the plaintiff sometimes loses! I should have thought that all cases would be “open and shut” cases and I find it odd that a plaintiff should take a case to court if that were not so. It is the cases where the plaintiff fails to win which seem to me the interesting ones. Have they any common features?

I don’t really think the hypothesis at pg. 13 will hold up. Assuming that slander can be equated with witchcraft—which is plausible, though rather dubious—there is quite a lot of data available about sex linkage of such phenomena in different types of society—offhand, I should not have thought that the patrilineal/matrilineal dichotomy has significance (eg. matrilineal Ashanti accuse female matrilineal consanguines of witchcraft, patrilineal Tiv accuse male patrilineal consanguines of witchcraft, matrilineal Doubans accuse male affines of sorcery, female affines of witchcraft. Patrilineal Kachin accuse male affines of witchcraft, male consanguines of slander, etc. etc.). On this point do you know Nadel’s paper in American Anthropologist around 1950/53 “Witchcraft in Four African Societies?”

With regard to Chapter 2, I am puzzled as to why you have only considered the sex of the defendant. To make a comparison with the statistic of pg. 7, the initial categories of Chart I, could we not also have a chart similar to Chart II confined to the accusations between kin, and which distinguished in separate columns the accusations…

M v M

F v F

M v F

F v M

(e.g. take simply the 15 cases listed as slander, interference, assault, battery, make a total breakdown showing in full the relationship between accuser and accused in each case).

My hypothesis would be that the nature of the accusation is determined (in the main) by the kin relationship existing between accuser and accused, which includes sex of both parties and also the affinal/consanguine distinction.

The general methodology certainly has possibilities. Something of the sort might for example be applied to the English 16/17th Century witchcraft trials where a lot of court records exist which (in form) are not unlike the first page of your paper.

Yours sincerely,

Edmund R. Leach

Center of Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences

In the following letter I responded to a challenge from the Department of Justice.

December 28, 1961

Mr. Lee Loevinger

Assistant Attorney General

Department of Justice

Dear Mr. Loevinger:

Although it has been some time since your interesting letter of November 6, I will not contain my response any longer. The following thoughts occurred to me.

You are perfectly right in saying that anthropologists and other social scientists ought to begin some studies of our own legal social structure, and at present I have some of my students doing field work in Oakland and environs on same … but you are dead wrong in saying that a study similar to the one on Zapotec law done in the Municipal Court in San Francisco would be more difficult or “considerably more instructive.” The paper I sent you dealt with but one small portion of Zapotec legal institutions. This would be comparable with an analysis of all the cases that go through the Juvenile Courts in San Francisco during one month’s time. I won’t push the point though, but you ought to try it (primitive law) sometime. It would be particularly instructive, from the point of view of perspective, for American lawyers to get some idea of the diversity ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Getting Started in the Sixties
• 2. Reinventing Anthropology in the Seventies
• 3. Uncovering Academic Mindsets in the Eighties
• 4. The Ivory Tower Is No More in the Nineties
• 5. A Twenty-First-Century World
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Letters in Order of Appearance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index