Ethnography in Unstable Places

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.Elizabeth Mertz is Associate Professor of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Research Fellow for the American Bar Foundation.Kay B. Warren is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

“Ethnography in Unstable Places is a profound exercise in ethnographic reflexivity. It seeks to consider new possibilities, new challenges, new horizons-at once conceptual, political, ethical-for an old anthropological method by taking it precisely where it was not designed to go: into everyday worlds radically transformed by hitherto unimaginedsocial conditions, unimaginable political circumstances, altered states, economies, subjectivities. Expansive in their scope, provocative in their theoretical implications, even poetic in their treatment of human lives, the essays in this volume show ‘where past has gone, where the future will come from’;the past and future, that is, of both anthropology and the worlds with which it concerns itself.”-John Comaroff, University of Chicago “Beyond being topical, this groundbreaking collection represents precisely the kind of inquiry that contemporary anthropology should be dedicating itself to-one brave enough to abide, ethnographically and theoretically, in the interstices of knowledge-based and experiential models, in the gaps between individual and collective agency, in realms of historical and cultural contingency.”-Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

• Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives / Carol J. Greenhouse Part One: Law against Culture Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation of Social Order in a Culture of Terror / Carroll McC. Lewin Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification and Vagrancy in Namibia / Robert J. Gordon Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture of German Reunification / Howard J. De Nike Part Two: Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration / Stacia E. Zabusky The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila / Phillip C. Parnell Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism Among Palestinian Women in Israel / Elizabeth Faier “Best Interests” and the Repatriation of Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors / James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu Part Three: Resistance and Remembrance Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and Territory in the New Europe / Eve Darian-Smith “Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay / Nancy Ries Trance Against the State / Judy Rosenthal Part Four: Conclusion The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty: Anthropological Theory and the Search for Culture / Elizabeth Mertz Toward in Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions / Kay B. Warren Contributors Works Cited Index