Focusing on the problem of time the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of...

Anthropologist Carol J. Greenhouse offers an ethnographic study of attitudes toward conflict and law in a predominantly white, middle-class, suburban, principally Southern Baptist community.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Between 1990 and 1996, the U.S. Congress passed market-based reforms in the areas of civil rights, welfare, and immigration in a series of major legislative initiatives. These were announced as curbs on excessive rights and as correctives to a culture of dependency among the urban poor--stock images of racial and cultural minorities that circulated well beyond Congress. But those images did not circulate unchallenged, even after congressional opposition failed. In The Paradox of Relevance, Carol J. Greenhouse...

Since 2008, the global economic crisis has exposed and deepened the tensions between austerity and social security--not just as competing paradigms of recovery but also as fundamentally different visions of governmental and personal responsibility. In this sense, the core premise of neoliberalism--the dominant approach to government around the world since the 1980s--may by now have reached a certain political limit. Based on the premise that markets are more efficient than government, neoliberal reforms were pushed by powerful national and transnational organizations as conditions of...

Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation's social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns located in New England, the Midwest, and the South view the law, courts, litigants, and social order.

Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," Sander County,...