- University of Chicago Department of Anthropology
1157 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 - 773-702-7736
Justin Richland
University of Chicago, Anthropology, Faculty Member
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In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of... more
In this article I reconsider Hopi tradition as jurisdiction—reflexive moments of Hopi legal discourse that orient to the limits of Hopi sovereignty, even as they presuppose its power. I explore these themes in two significant moments of Hopi political history. First, I consider the uses of tradition in the creation of the contemporary Hopi tribe through the field notes of the US agent charged with drafting the 1936 Hopi Constitution. Then I consider more contemporary uses of tradition in recent Hopi tribal court cases that extended judicial power over matters reserved for local village leadership. Both instances suggest efforts to potentialize tribal power even as they orient explicitly to the limits of that authority. These traditions are thus, ironically, understood not as replaying Euro-American logics of nationalist totalities, but as indigenous sociopolitical actions that unsettle static representations of Hopi cultural identity and the sovereignty claimed through them.
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This issue of PoLAR contains three articles examining single trials as core ethnographic moments. We moved from a criminal trial in South Africa, through a civil trial in the United States in which a Salvadoran plaintiff seeks justice for... more
This issue of PoLAR contains three articles examining single trials as core ethnographic moments. We moved from a criminal trial in South Africa, through a civil trial in the United States in which a Salvadoran plaintiff seeks justice for abuses she suffered at the hands of ...
Research Interests: Law and Anthropology
ABSTRACT In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo-American peer-reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related,... more
ABSTRACT In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo-American peer-reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those forms by social actors caught up in them. The second reveals a concern with the imbrications of political and scientific epistemologies, particularly as they emerge in state policies and actions around issues of public health, the environment, and agriculture. Where they come together is in the number of studies whose objects of inquiry reside at the nexus where science, politics, and markets meet in what they see as the creeping expansion of neoliberal logics and their implications for the state as a political formation. [Keywords: sociocultural anthropology, neoliberalism, science studies, public health, capitalism]
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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... more
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]
Research Interests: Law and Anthropology
Research Interests: Law and Law Literature
Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court.Justin Richland University of Chicago Press, 2008.
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic “talk about courtroom talk,” whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi... more
In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic “talk about courtroom talk,” whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity—in which claims to cultural distinctiveness are either libratory or reifying, autochthonous or other determined—suggesting that a sharper picture of cultural politics takes these antinomies together as the ironic dialectics constituting the emergent “edge” of indigenous governance today.
Research Interests: Law, Anthropology, Pragmatism, Sovereignty, Governance, and 4 moreLanguage, Iteration, Court, and American Ethnologist
Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal... more
Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal institutions that continue to employ legal processes informed by both Anglo-style adversarial notions of law and “local” notions of law, culture, and tradition. Using methods of legal discourse analysis and language ideology studies, this article investigates how interlocutors in a hearing before the courts of the Hopi Indian Nation construct discourses of tradition and Anglo American jurisprudence in multiple and competing ways, and for significant sociopolitical effect. An argument is thus made for attending to the microdetails of sociolegal interactions as an important site for exploring the complex articulations between the contemporary lives of indigenous peoples and the laws with which they are imbricated.
Research Interests: Sociology, Criminology, Law, Law and Society, Justice, and 3 moreLanguage, Newspaper, and Full Text Vol 5
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ALTAMIRA PRESS A Division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1630 North Main Street, #367 Walnut Creek, CA 94596 http://www.altamirapress.com Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A Member of the Rowman &... more
ALTAMIRA PRESS A Division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1630 North Main Street, #367 Walnut Creek, CA 94596 http://www.altamirapress.com Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes ...
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In 2013 Hopi Tribal representatives met with US Forest Service officials to consult on the " significance " of archaeological sites within the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplifies the consultations that Federal law requires... more
In 2013 Hopi Tribal representatives met with US Forest Service officials to consult on the " significance " of archaeological sites within the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplifies the consultations that Federal law requires Executive agencies to undertake with Native Nations. Disagreement persists about " meaningful tribal consultation " and its efficacies. This paper deploys insights from critical indigenous studies and linguistic anthropology to analyze the interactional details of the consultations I observed. Unpacking those interactions in light of Hopi theories of knowledge and authority, particularly as they are figured through co-narrations I call jurisdiction , I argue that that these consultations enact Hopi and Anglo-legal norms of " significance " in complex ways. In so doing, I suggest that " meaningful consultation " must include understanding how indigenous nations stage and enact the conditions of their ongoing authority in the interactional details of indigenous jurisdiction, and the refusals and relations to settler colonialism this jurisdiction entails.