This engaging book focuses on how Hopi tradition and custom are brought into Hopi legal proceedings in the Hopi Tribal Court. Hopi people see their future wellbeing as dependent on their ability to maintain and further their cultural heritage, and they are interested in transforming the deeply Anglo-American legal practices in this court to that end. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the work carries forward the tradition of legal discourse analysis that is grounded in the micro-analysis of transcripts of recordings of courtroom interaction. Following this tradition and the broader interactionist traditions that have significantly influenced analyses of legal discourse, Justin Richland, the author, is committed to the basic idea that social realities are created in and through the process of face-to-face interaction. At the same time, he also draws on recent developments in linguistic anthropological analysis of language ideologies and semiotics in ways that alter our perspectives on legal discourse.
The most appealing and effectively wrought theme that Richland sustains through the book is his idea that he is documenting and we are witnessing the emerging culture of tribal law in the Hopi court, and the leading edge of tribal sovereignty. This vision argues for the contribution linguistic anthropology can make to cultural anthropology: It can show how cultures change and undergo transformation in and through the process of face-to-face interaction. Richland highlights several different aspects of this process. First we have Hopi traditional discourse about justice pushing its way into the Anglo-American legal discourse, in a sense transforming Hopi law every time tradition is raised. On a more micro-analytical level, the “edge” of the emergence of law is the most recent speaker’s turn at talk that raises the relevance of tradition. And this turn’s contribution will then itself be transformed by the response to it. It becomes clear that this process of the emergence of law includes much contestation and multiplicity of perspectives.
Where a given specific discourse about tradition is sustained over multiple court exchanges, Richland uses this semiotic concept of multiple “iterations” of the same thing. Because the contexts of individual iterations differ, a given iteration always involves both sameness and difference relative to past iterations, which leave their “trace” in any new iteration. Richland uses theft to illustrate this iterative process: Each court case of theft is an iteration of a legal concept of theft that will be like and unlike cases of theft that have gone before, and each will transform the concept of theft, however minutely.
For Richland, that which gets iterated is a type of discourse about Hopi tradition. So, for example, in one case the language ideology that testimony in the Hopi language can more effectively convey Hopi tradition than testimony in English constitutes such a discourse. Richland shows how this discourse undergoes transformations in a case in which a Hopi man had a trailer put on some land after being refused permission to do so by the governor of the village where the land was. First the man’s Hopi lawyer argues that she can better express the Hopi tradition involved in this case in the Hopi language. The non-Hopi lawyer for the opposing side counters her request by arguing that Hopi should only be used if there are witnesses who can’t speak English. This is the Anglo-American legal position, so he is countering one language ideology about languages other than English in court with another. The Hopi lawyer for the man with the trailer then offers different reasons for using Hopi language that focus on tribal sovereignty and the Hopi court being for the benefit of Hopi people, not people who don’t speak Hopi. This particular metadiscourse about the Hopi language undergoes additional transformations in the author’s analysis of this legal case, but I aim here simply to illustrate the kind of evidence Richland puts forth for his characterization of Hopi tradition in the courts as emergent and as undergoing constant transformation.
Such analysis does raise methodological and phenomenological questions about when one can be said to be talking about the same thing. In semiotic discussion of iterations of a sign, and discussion of type-token relationships, it is relatively easy to identify instances of the same word (as a type of sign), though even this can present difficulties. When we move to the level of whole discourses defined by their ideological content, we are dealing with something much more nebulous, and it is more difficult to agree about what counts as different tokens of a same type, or different iterations of a same ideology. I think this is one reason we have not seen more of the kind of analysis that the author presents us with here, yet we see how productive his efforts in this area are, and he does provide a model for how such analysis can be done.
Hopi people and the Hopi legal community have only relatively recently established law that makes it possible for Hopi tradition to become an admissible legal interpretive frame within the Hopi Tribal Court. So when one reads this book, it really feels like one is witnessing actors in the Hopi Tribal Court exploring and experimenting with how to incorporate tradition into their predominantly Anglo-American courtroom legal discourse. Two strategies emerge as repeated across the examples of courtroom engagement with tradition that are analyzed closely here. First, judges shift the organization of interaction from an adversarial format of exam and cross-exam to one in which the judge takes over the role of questioning, because Hopi people find the adversarial format of Anglo-American legal proceedings not in keeping with the handling of conflict in their traditional culture. Second, the judges identify aspects of cases that they see as more appropriately dealt with by the leaders of the village from which litigants come. Village leaders who have great knowledge of Hopi customs can be called in to testify in a hearing-like format presided over by the judge. Or the judge can decide simply to turn a case over to village leaders. This latter strategy looks to me more like an extrusion than an incorporation of tradition, a point that Richland does not address, but it is also a ceding of authority to sources of authority outside the court, and is thus an expansion of traditional authority.
The book’s concern with a dialogue between traditional discourse and Anglo-American discourse in the Hopi Tribal Court has wider relevance. Richland makes it clear that his own focus on this topic is driven by Hopi interest in the topic. Hopi concerns to bring traditional discourses into the courts are shared with other groups: The Hopi people share a desire for more political and legal sovereignty with other Indian reservations and with other indigenous ethnic minorities around the world. Moreover, ideologically, the distinction between tradition and law and conflict over their manifestations and allocations occurs in a wide range of formerly British colonial contexts and colonial institutional complexes, including religion, education, and political organization as well as law, albeit configured in stunningly variable ways. More broadly still, whenever sociolinguists are dealing with how multiple interpretive perspectives are encoded in and organized through discourse, they are dealing with the same kinds of issues or related issues. Richland’s approach here can be of use and a model for such work, particularly in its emphasis on micro-temporal transformations of the sort I have already discussed.
In the conclusion to this book, the author relates his analysis to the primarily anthropological literature on “invented traditions.” In this literature some scholars have taken the position that many so-called traditions have simply been made up by local people and/or colonizers, or at the very least they are not what they once were, are not what was done in the past. Some authors suggest that those who invoke tradition are doing so cynically to gain power. Others view tradition as itself a European concept, so that when local people activate this concept they are merely buying into and being duped by a hegemonic discourse. Richland critiques all of these perspectives by both revealing and advocating a different perspective. He shows how the Hopi themselves engage issues of tradition. There is no mistaking how epistemologically engaged Hopi people are with both the concept of tradition and its very material ramifications. Richland’s position is that the issues and questions raised around the concept of tradition belong to the Hopi people and not the analysts – it is theirs to decide what it is.
The analysis of transcripts enables the author to distinguish his voice from theirs, and to separate their understandings from his, rather than allowing the analyst to rhetorically appropriate the understanding of the people he or she studies. This separating of voices owes much to the recent work by linguistic anthropologists on language ideologies, metapragmatics, and metadiscourses. The author uses all of these concepts to capture how Hopi constitute tradition in their court. And in this it is possible to see Richland’s contribution to the emerging edge of legal discourse analysis, and more broadly to the transformation over time of interactionist analyses of the constitution of social realities.
This is a terrific book. It is accessible to undergraduate and advanced scholar alike. And it can be used to address a wide range of issues in sociolinguistic and anthropological scholarship in both teaching and research.
