1 Milner, Neal, “The Intrigues of Rights, Resistance, and Accommodation,” 17 Law & Soc. Inquiry 313. Page references in the text are to Milner's Review Essay.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Carol J. Greenhouse, Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986) (“Greenhouse, Praying for Justice”).Google Scholar

3 Sally Falk Moore, “Law as Social Change: The Semi-autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,” in S. F. Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Moore's concept of the semi-autonomous social field has earned wide currency in social anthropology and other disciplines concerned with legal pluralism, as it offers a unit of analysis of variation and change. Her definition is: “The semiautonomous social field has rule-making capacities, and the means to induce or coerce compliance; but it is simultaneously set in a larger social matrix which can, and does, affect and invade it, sometimes at the invitation of persons inside it, sometimes at its own instance.” Id. at 55–56. The ethnographic issues arising from the Baptist congregation that concern Milner and me were not matters of rules—implicit, explicit, formal, informal, written, unwritten, or unspoken (to borrow from the list of conventional distinctions)—but of local practices of interpretation and meaning with respect to individual and group behavior.Google Scholar

4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” in C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson & Brooke G. Schoepf (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967).Google Scholar

5 See Barbara E. Ward, “Varieties of the Conscious Model: The Fishermen of South China,” in Max Gluckman & Fred Eggan, eds., The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, A.S.A. Monographs 1 (London: Tavistock Publications; New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965). In this sense, “habitus,” the more current term, better captures the uneven promises of “the rules of the game. See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

6 For discussion of narrative as the medium of historical consciousness, see Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), Or Richard Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

7 In default of extended treatments of disputes in the book, Milner supplies them from an essentially hypothetical vantage point—culminating in the root canal analogy—that converts Baptists' prayers into practices, their ethical prescriptions into behavioral predictions, and their church into a cultural minority. The heart of Milner's comparison between Sally Merry's Getting Justice and Getting Even (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and my own is heavily hypothetical. For example, Milner writes that a Hopewell Baptist “would face a strong religious obstacle that Merry's court users presumably did not encounter” if pressed by circumstances to consider litigation (p. 319); I have no evidence that this is the case. The “root canal theory” leads Milner to offer this speculation on what “the Baptist's” would say: “‘Pain? What pain? Even if I felt the pain, there is nothing anyone but God can do about it’”(ibid). His reference to non-Baptists' tolerance of “the distance the Baptists put between themselves and the rest of the community” is also hypothetical (p. 329).Google Scholar

Elsewhere, though perhaps in contexts less central to the present discussion, Milner's presentation of historical and ethnographic detail contains errors, e.g., in his claim that “Hopewell Baptists tried to remove law and disputing as ways of defining or resolving problems” in the late 19th century (p. 318), his comparison of the Baptists and Amish (pp. 325–27), and his assertion that the Baptists do not proselytize (pp. 329–30). He claims that I was “never pressured” to join the church (p. 330). As I wrote in the preface to the book, I felt heavily pressured to do so.Google Scholar

Closer to the main concerns of this exchange are Milner's characterization of my book's central aims. Throughout his essay, he portrays my study as one that represents Baptists as typical of other Americans; I was careful to do just the opposite—although obviously not carefully enough (for my rejection of “typicality,” see Greenhouse, Praying for justice 34–37). For example, on page 317, he refers to my view that “Hopewell Baptists resemble the prevailing U.S. ideologies regarding the use of law. She says that Americans are non-litigious, just as these Hopewell Baptists are.” I did open the book with a background statement summarizing empirical studies of American disputing behavior then available: “A major finding of empirical studies of the use of law in the last decade is that, in spite of a popular image of the United States as a litigious society, Americans seem to prefer avoidance to other modes of dispute resolution.”Praying for Justice 9. Milner is perhaps also referring to this statement of the book's scope and aims: “most Americans do not use the courts to process their personal complaints, so the widespread lack of experience with the courts in Hopewell is not surprising or especially significant” (id. at 13; for a more current assessment of law use, see Marc Galanter, “Law Abounding: Legalisation around the North Atlantic,” 55(1) Mod. L. Rev. 1 (1992)). These are the only direct references to what “Americans” do; “litigiousness” in Hopewell or elsewhere is not central to the book's scope or aims. Later, he says that my emphasis on what he calls “general beliefs” among Baptists “creates a skewed portrait of those closer to the mainstream of American legal culture” (p. 319)—again implying that my aim was to create a portrait of American law use, in Hopewell or elsewhere. It was not. See Greenhouse, Praying for justice 24–25 & 27–34.Google Scholar

Milner is right to suggest caution in generalizing from the Hopewell study (although I think he might be more cautious himself in his assertions of what “the rest of society” (p. 315) thinks and does). My principal concerns with the Hopewell material since 1986 have been with problems of comparison and generalization. Carol Greenhouse, “History, Faith and Avoidance,” in Hervé Varenne, ed., Symbolizing America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); id., “Courting Difference: Issues of Interpretation and Comparison in the Study of Legal Ideologies,” 22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 687 (1988); id., “Interpreting American Litigiousness,” in June O. Starr & Jane F. Collier, eds., History and Power in the Study of Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); id., “Signs of Quality: Individualism and Hierarchy in American Culture,” 19 (2) American Ethnologist 233 (1992); And Carol Greenhouse, David Engel & Barbara Yngvesson, “Contest and Community: The Meanings of Law in Three American Towns” (unpublished, n.d.; on file with the author) (“Greenhouse et al., ‘Contest and Community’“).Google Scholar

8 This is another theme of the book and, in comparative context, of Greenhouse et al., “Contest and Community.”.Google Scholar

9 See Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), On family values, and John D. Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), On art, antiques, and artisanal exchange.Google Scholar

10 I infer, but will never know, that for this same reason, no one I spoke with in Hopewell seemed the least interested in “playing along” with the anonymity I had been at considerable pains to preserve for the place and the people I had known. Still, no one suggested that I need not have bothered; indeed, the subject did not come up, though I did raise it with the university librarian in the context of her plans to display the book as one of local interest. I suspect that the nature of my focus, and the intervening years, have now masked the town and especially the church more effectively than my deliberately misleading geography and pseudonyms. In the interim, anthropologists have revised their statement of professional ethics in a way that places less specific stress on masking the identity of places, but I do not consider myself exempt from the old canon even now.Google Scholar

11 Sally E. Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar

12 More generally, see Greenhouse et al., “Contest and Community.”.Google Scholar

13 Merry at 1.Google Scholar

14 Id. at 113–15.Google Scholar

15 Id. at 62–63.Google Scholar

16 Id. at 1.Google Scholar