Laura Nader

Laura Nader (born 1930) is an American anthropologist.

She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. (She was the first woman to receive a tenure-track position in the department.) She received a BA in Latin American Studies from Wells College in Aurora, NY in 1952. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College (the women’s counterpart which joined Harvard in 1999) in 1961 under the mentorship of Clyde Kluckhohn. Her education included fieldwork in a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico, which nurtured her interest in law as it exists in various societies. This interest that began with her family, which stressed the importance of law and justice.

Her father Nathra owned a restaurant in Connecticut, which served as a place for many political discussions. Her mother, Rose was a schoolteacher who had a strong interest in justice and would express her views in letters to the press. Her older deceased brother, Shafeek; her older sister, Claire and her younger brother, Ralph have all served in public interest careers. Nkrumah (2005) profiled Dr. Nader in the weekly online news out of Egypt and commented on her loyalties to her father who emigrated from Lebanon for political reasons, “Nader is very much her father's daughter. Only Ralph Nader, by far the most famous of the four, does not possess a PhD -- and that was his own choice. And it was her elder brother John -- himself a distinguished anthropologist -- who first suggested she read anthropology at university. He was her mentor at the time”. Even though Laura is supportive of her brother, Ralph, she does not declare a specific politics. She does well to maintain a private life and since she uses her professional name one would hardly know she is married Millerson, and a mother to three daughters.

Research

Nader’s areas of interest include comparative ethnography of law and dispute resolution, conflict, comparative family organization, the anthropology of professional mindsets and ethnology of the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America and the contemporary United States. She was involved in conferences in the 1960s, determining the direction the study of law in society as a part of society and not insulated and isolated from other human institutions, should take as it developed. Nader edited and published essays from these conferences as well as authoring several books on the anthropology of law, establishing herself as one of the most influential figures in the development of the field.

Some of her work focuses on conflict resolution in the Zapotec village she studied. Nader notes that people confront each other face to face on a personal scale. Judges strive to find solutions that are balanced rather than placing one hundred percent of the blame on one party. Nader believes this reflects the society, their economic system, hierarchal structure and any other institution or variable. In contrast, she finds that in the United States, conflict often escalates to polarized blame and violence. The group of people a person may need to confront may be large and impersonal and much more powerful than themselves. She concludes that the kinds of cases people bring to court, reflect areas of stress in the social structure of a community.

However, Nader has written extensively about "harmony ideology," the ideology centered around the belief that the existence of conflict is necessarily a bad or dysfunctional thing and that a healthy society is one that achieves harmony between people and minimizes conflict and confrontation. She has argued in her book Harmony Ideology that harmony ideology has been spread amongst colonized peoples around the world by missionaries prior to (and facilitating) their military colonization and that the Zapotec used it in a "counter-hegemonic" way by maintaining the appearance of harmony (while in practice engaging in a great deal of litigation) in order to prevent the Mexican government from interfering with their relative autonomy. Nader has also argued that harmony ideology has been an important basis for unsubstantiated ideas that have developed in the United States since the 1960s about a "litigation explosion" and for the development of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a method for removing so-called "garbage cases" (for instance, the then newly appearing civil rights cases of the 1960s) from the courtroom into an arena that emphasizes harmony, compromise and the language of therapy over talk of injustice.

While Nader's career began with a strong interest in law and forms of social control, over time she became more interested in questions of cultural control and "controlling processes" (also the title of an immensely popular undergraduate course she teaches), a concept described further in her 1997 article, "Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power."

One of Nader's best known contributions was in writing the at the time highly controversial "Up the Anthropologist--Perspectives Gained From Studying Up" in 1969, which was "one of the first calls to anthropologists to think more about the 'study of the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty.'" This call led many anthropologists to begin to "study up," although many misinterpreted Nader's call and did not simultaneously study "down" and "sideways." Nader's works for the field of anthropology and discipline have led her to be described as "the embodied moral conscience of post-Boasian American anthropology."

Nader has coined the term "trustanoia" to describe the antonym of paranoia and the state of Americans' feeling of trust of others. She contends that people in the United States trust that there is always someone there to take care of them, and that everyone (including legislators and politicians) acts in their interest.

Awards

• Morgan Spanish Prize, Wells College [2]
• Wells College Alumnae Award, Wells College
• Radcliffe College Alumnae Award
• Harry Kalven Prize (1995), Law and Society Association [3]
• American Anthropological Association, Distinguished Lecture Award (2000), American Anthropological Association [4]

Publications

Books

• Laura Nader (1962). Conflict resolution in two Mexican communities. S.l. : s.n. OCLC 10637168. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1964). The ethnography of law. Stanford, Calif.: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. OCLC 8869632.
• Laura Nader (1964). Talea and Juquila; a comparison of Zapotec social organization. University of California Press. OCLC 2958459.
• Laura Nader (1965). The ethnography of law. Menasha, Wisconsin: American Anthropological Association. OCLC 3075225.
• Laura Nader (1969). Law in culture and society. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. OCLC 59266. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1973). Cultural illness and health; essays in human adaptation. Washington: American Anthropological Association. OCLC 741222. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1976). The Kroeber Islanders ; a handbook of anthropology at Berkeley. University of California, Dept. of Anthropology. OCLC 29557308. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1977). The problem of order in a faceless society. s.l. : s.n. OCLC 4865456.
• Laura Nader (1978). The Disputing process : law in ten societies. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231045360. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1980). Energy Choices in a Democratic Society. National Academy of Sciences. ISBN 0309030455. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Laura Nader (1981). No Access to Law: Alternatives to the American Judicial System. Academic Press. ISBN 0125135629. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Gary B Melton (1986). The law as a behavioral instrument. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803231008. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Laura Nader (1990). Harmony ideology : justice and control in a Zapotec mountain village. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804718091.
• Laura Nader (1992). The Cheyenne way : conflict and case law in primitive jurisprudence : K.N. LLewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel : notes from the editors. Delran, New Jersey: The Legal Classics Library. OCLC 28897832.
• Laura Nader (1994). Essays on controlling processes. Berkeley, CA: Kroeber Anthropological Society. OCLC 31980852.. Reprinted in 1996 OCLC 36139409, 2002 OCLC 50922612 and 2005 OCLC 68178289.
• Laura Nader (1996). Naked science : anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power, and knowledge. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415914647.
• Laura Nader (1997). Law in culture and society. University of California Press. ISBN 0520208331.
• Laura Nader (2002). The life of the law : anthropological projects. University of California Press. ISBN 0520229886. Reprinted in 2005 ISBN 0520231635.
• Ugo Mattei; Laura Nader (2008). Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 9781405178945.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Printed in 2008 ISBN 9781405178945.

External links

• Laura Nader's biosketch at UC-Berkeley
• The Drift to War; Laura Nader, Interviewed by John M. Whiteley
• Q and A: A Conversation with Laura Nader
• Laura Nader: Speaking out. When silence is part of the problem (Al-Ahram Weekly)
• Laura Nader: What's Good About Conflict? (Anthropology News)
• Laura Nader keynote address at American University Fifth Annual Public Anthropology Conference