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Society
for Cultural Anthropology
Culture@Large
"Race,
Power, and Social Justice"
Organized by Polly Strong
New Orleans, 2002
Each year SCA's Culture at Large session features a lecture
by a prominent scholar from outside the discipline, followed
by responses from anthropologists representing various perspectives.
The speaker for 2002 was Gerald Torres of
the University of Texas Law School, an important figure in
critical race theory, environmental law, and American Indian
law. Torres most recently co-authored, with Lani Guinier,
The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming
Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002).
Weaving together an understanding of race as both structural
and experiential, Foucaultian and feminist approaches to power,
and a dose of magical realism (among other influences), The
Miner’s Canary seeks to advance critical race theory
from the legal arena into that of political theory and democratic
practice. The book’s title is drawn from a 1953 article
in the Yale Law Journal by Felix S. Cohen, the foundational
theorist of Indian law, who wrote: "Like the miner’s
canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison
gas in our political atmosphere, and our treatment of the
Indian . . .marks the rise and fall in our democratic faith."
(62:48, 390).
Guinier
and Torres identify all those who are racially marginalized
with the miner’s canary, stating that "their distress
is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all."
Through a series of case studies concerning such topics as
affirmative action, political districting, racial profiling,
and labor and community organizing, The Miner’s Canary
considers "how racialized identities may be put to service
to achieve social change through democratic renewal"
in a movement "led by people of color but joined by others"
(pp. 11-12). A critique of the discourse of colorblindness
as well as identity politics, the book’s structure enacts
the coalition-building that it advocates.
Torres’s lecture, "The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting
Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy,” discussed
the broader narrative turn in legal scholarship. As he explains
in a 2002 article in the Harvard Law Review, this
approach rests on an interdisciplinary literature emphasizing
"the importance of narrative in understanding and ultimately
transforming social realities" (115:1362). The methodologies
of anthropology, linguistics, and rhetoric play an important
role in this approach to law, particularly in their ability
to illuminate "the plurality of social lives," "the
role of law in those lives," and "the process of
translation between stories across cultures" (1394-95).
Attention to narrativity is significant in The Miner’s
Canary as well as Torres’s analysis of two important
court cases in which Native American stories failed to translate
meaningfully in the courtroom: the Mashpee claims case (Duke
Law Journal, 1990) and a Supreme Court case involving
the construction of a paved road impacting sites sacred to
Yurok, Karok, and Tolowa Indians (Harvard Law Review,
2002).
Anthropologists Nahum Chandler (Johns Hopkins),
Renato Rosaldo (Stanford), and Verena
Stolcke (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
served as discussants. Each reflected on Torres’s lecture
and writings from the perspective of his or her own theoretical
and substantive work on race, power, and social justice.
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