Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T03:40:08.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Legally Mediated Identity: The National Environmental Policy Act and the Bureaucratic Construction of Interests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Wendy Espeland
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In representing the interests of a group, law may simultaneously construct the subject holding those interests. When groups question the implications of an imposed subjectivity, the politics of identity may become a forum for resistance. I examine law's potential to shape identity, based on a controversial decision affecting Yavapai residents of the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona. A proposed dam threatened to move the Yavapai from their ancestral land. To develop the Environmental Impact Statement required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation adopted a rational decision framework that some Yavapai believed misrepresented them. Their resistance stimulated a reinterpretation of their collective identity, a defense of their distinctiveness, and a reassertion of their right to represent themselves. The effect of this reappraisal was a new appreciation and articulateness about Yavapai distinctiveness, an invigorated sense of their own history and, most important, their enhanced empowerment.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 5: Symposium: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies , 1994 , pp. 1149 - 1179
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Thanks to Mindie Lazarus-Black, Bruce G. Carruthers, john Comaroff, Paul Culhane, Ken Dauber, Paul Friesema, Carol Heimer, Royce P. jones, Elizabeth Mertz, Debra Schleef, Paul Schnorr, Peter Siegleman, David Shulman, john Walton, and the anonymous reviewers for Law & Society Review for helpful comments. Earlier versions were presented at the Law and Society annual meetings, Chicago 1993, the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, the American Bar Foundation, and the Midwest Faculty Seminar. I am grateful to these audiences for their good questions and helpful responses.

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, Barry F. (1981) Cascaded Trade-Offs: A Multi-Objective, Multiple-Publics Method for Alternatives Evaluation in Water Resources Planning. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.Google Scholar
Anderson, Frederick R. (1973) NEPA in the Courts: A Legal Analysis of the National Environmental Policy Act. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Andrews, Richard N. L. (1976) Environmental Analysis and Administrative Change. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Anonymous (1988) “A Yavapai Woman Speaks,” in Niederman, S., ed., A Quilt of Words: Women's Diaries, Letters and Original Accounts of Life in the Southwest, 1860–1960. Boulder, CO: Johnson Books.Google Scholar
Blundell, William E. (1981) “Arizona Indians Win Victory over U.S.: Refuse $$33 Million,” Wall Street J., 17 Dec, sec. 1, p. 1.Google Scholar
Bourke, John G. (1891) On the Border with Crook. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.Google Scholar
Bronson, Leisa (1980) “The Long Walk of the Yavapai,” 13 (1) Wassaja/The Indian Historian 36.Google Scholar
Caldwell, Lynton K. (1982) Science and the National Environmental Policy Act: Redirecting Policy through Procedural Reform. University: Univ. of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Cappelletti, Mauro, & Garth, Bryant (1978) Access to Justice: A World Survey. Milan: Sijthoff Giuffre.Google Scholar
Casserly, J. J. (1981) “Different Drummers: The Indians and Orme Dam,” Arizona Republic, 22 May, sec. A, p. 5.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean & John, (1988) “Through the Looking-Glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind,” 1 J. of Historical Sociology 6.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean & John, (1991) Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbusier, William T. (1971) Verde to San Carlos: Recollections of a Famous Army Surgeon and His Observant Family on the Western Frontier, 1869–1886. Tucson, AZ: Dale Stuart King.Google Scholar
Culhane, Paul J. (1990) “NEPA's Impact on Federal Agencies, Anticipated and Unanticipated,” 20 Environmental Law 681.Google Scholar
Curlin, James W. (1973) National Environmental Policy Act of 1969: Environmental Indices. Prepared for Committee on Insular Affairs of the U.S. Senate. Washington, DC (Dec).Google Scholar
Cyert, Richard, & March, James G. (1963) Behaviorial Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Espeland, Wendy N. (1992) “Contested Rationalities: Commensuration and the Representation of Value in Public Choice.” Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Sociology, Univ. of Chicago.Google Scholar
Espeland, Wendy N., (1993) “Power, Policy and Paperwork: The Bureaucratic Representation of Interests,” 16 Qualitative Sociology 297.Google Scholar
Finn, Terence T. (1973) “Conflict and Compromise: Congress Makes a Law—The Passage of the National Environmental Policy Act.” Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Political Science, Georgetown Univ.Google Scholar
Fitzsimmons, Stephen J., Stuart, Lorrie I., & Wolff, Peter C. (1977) Social Assessment Manual: A Guide to the Preparation of the Social Well-Being Account for Planning Water Resource Projects. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. & trans. C. Gordon. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1982) “Afterword,” in H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press.Google Scholar
Friesema, H. Paul, & Culhane, Paul J. (1976) “Social Impacts, Politics, and the Environmental Impact Statement Process,” 16 Natural Resources J. 339.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Granfleld, Robert (1992) Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart (1992) “New Ethnicities,” in Donald, J. & Rattansi, A., eds., “Race,” Culture and Difference. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Heinz, John P., & Laumann, Edward O. (1982) Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Chicago: American Bar Foundation.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan (1976) “Law, State and Class Struggle,” 20 Marxism Today 178.Google Scholar
Khera, Sigrid, ed. (1978) The Yavapai of Fort McDowell. Fountain Hills, AZ.: Fort McDowell Mohave-Apache Indian Community.Google Scholar
Lempert, Richard, & Sanders, Joseph (1986) An Invitation to Law and Social Science. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liroff, Richard A. (1976) A National Policy for the Environent: NEPA and Its Aftermath. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mazmanian, Daniel A., & Nienaber, Jeanne (1979) Can Organizations Change? Environmental Protection, Citizen Participation and the Corps of Engineers. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Mariella, Patricia (1983) “The Political Economy of Federal Resettlement Communities: The Fort McDowell Yavapai Case.” Ph.D. Diss., Dept. of Anthropology, Arizona State Univ.Google Scholar
Miliband, Ralph (1969) The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Minow, Martha (1990) Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion and American Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. (1992a) “Objectivity as Standardization: The Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis,” 9 Annals of Scholarship 19.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M., (1992b) “Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science,” 22 Social Studies of Science 633.Google Scholar
Poulantzas, Nicos (1975) Political Power and Social Classes. London: NLB.Google Scholar
Raz, Joseph (1986) The Morality of Freedom. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, Clarendon.Google Scholar
Rodgers, William H. Jr. (1990) “NEPA at Twenty: Mimicry and Recruitment in Environmental Law,” 20 Environmental Law 485.Google Scholar
Scheingold, Stuart A. (1974) The Politics of Bights: Lawyers, Public Policy and Political Change. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Schnaiberg, Allan (1986) The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Schroeder, Albert (1974) Yavapai Indians: A Study of Yavapai History. New York: Garland Publications.Google Scholar
Schroeder, Albert, (1982) “Yavapai Land Tenure at Fort McDowell.” U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Final Report Social Impacts and Effects, A-1, A-2.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. D. Levine. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Serge (1984) Making Bureaucracies Think: The Environmental Impact Strategy of Administrative Reform. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Edward P. (1975) Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Tulumello, Mike (1981) “Indians Begin Hike to Capitol,” Mesa Tribune, 24 Sept., p. 1.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor Witter (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior (1873) Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior (1874) Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1947) Report on Central Arizona Project. Project Planning Report No. 3-8b-4-2.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1963) Pacific Southwest Water Plan: Supplemental Information on Central Arizona Project.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1972) Central Arizona Project Final Environmental Statement.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1976a) Socioeconomic Study of the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation and Community with and without the Development of Orme Dam and Reservoir. Prepared by the Natelson Corp.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1976b) Orme Dam Reservoir, Central Arizona Project, Arizona-New Mexico. Draft Environmental Impact Statement.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1977) Water and Land Resources Accomplishments.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1981a) Appendix A: Summary and Evaluation of Central Arizona Water Control Study Public Involvement Program.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1981b) Appendix B: Central Arizona Water Control Study Public Values Assessment.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1981c) Congressional Briefing on Central Arizona Project Status.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1982a) Field Draft, Environmental Impact Statement, Central Arizona Project Regulatory Storage Division, Central Arizona Water Control Study.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1982b) Summary and Evaluation of Central Arizona Water Control Study Public Involvement Program, 1979–1980.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (1982c) Final Report: Social Impacts and Effects of Central Arizona Water Control Study Plans.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior, Water & Power Resources Service [Bureau of Reclamation] (1979) Commensuration in Federal Water Resources Planning: Problem Analysis and Research Appraisal. Research Report 79-2 prepared by William Lord, Donald Deane, & Marvin Waterstone.Google Scholar
Walton, John (1992) Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana A. (1989) “The Social Meaning of Money: ‘Special Monies,‘” 95 American J. of Sociology 342.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana A. (1994) The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar

Statute

National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 102 U.S.C. 4332 (1970).Google Scholar