Laura Nader

Laura Nader (born 1930) is an American anthropologist.

She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960.cite journal | journal = Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology | year = 2004 | volume = 10| issue = 3 | pages = pp 297–299 | doi = 10.1207/s15327949pac1003_6 | author = Laura Nader | title = The Link Between Justice and International Law | id = ISSN|1532-7949 ] She received a BA in Latin American Studies from Wells College in Aurora, NY in 1952. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1961. Her education included fieldwork in a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico, which nurtured her interest in law as it exists in various societies, an interest that began with her family, which stressed the importance of law and justice. Ralph Nader, consumer activist, is Laura Nader's younger brother.

Research

Nader’s areas of interest include comparative ethnography of law and dispute resolution, conflict, comparative family organization, the anthropology of professional mindsets and ethnology of the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America and the contemporary United States. She was involved in conferences in the 1960s, determining the direction the study of law in society as a part of society and not insulated and isolated from other human institutions, should take as it developed. Nader edited and published essays from these conferences as well as authoring several books on the anthropology of law, establishing herself as an influential figure in the development of the field.

Some of her work focuses on conflict resolution in the Zapotec village she studied. Nader notes that people confront each other face to face on a personal scale. Judges strive to find solutions that are balanced rather than placing one hundred percent of the blame on one party. Nader believes this reflects the society, their economic system, hierarchal structure and any other institution or variable. In contrast, she finds that in the United States, conflict often escalates to polarized blame and violence. The group of people a person may need to confront may be large and impersonal and much more powerful than themselves. She concludes that the kinds of cases people bring to court, reflect areas of stress in the social structure of a community.

However, Nader has written extensively about "harmony ideology," the ideology centered around the belief that the existence of conflict is necessarily a bad or dysfunctional thing and that a healthy society is one that achieves harmony between people and minimizes conflict and confrontation. She has argued in her book "Harmony Ideology" that harmony ideology has been spread amongst colonized peoples around the world by missionaries prior to (and facilitating) their military colonization and that the Zapotec used it in a "counter-hegemonic" way by maintaining the appearance of harmony (while in practice engaging in a great deal of litigation) in order to prevent the Mexican government from interfering with their relative autonomy. Nader has also argued that harmony ideology has been an important basis for unsubstantiated ideas that have developed in the United States since the 1960s about a "litigation explosion" and for the development of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a method for removing so-called "garbage cases" (for instance, the then newly appearing civil rights cases of the 1960s) from the courtroom into an arena that emphasizes harmony, compromise and the language of therapy over talk of injustice.

Nader has coined the term "trustanoia" to describe the antonym of paranoia and the state of Americans' feeling of trust of others. She contends that people in the United States trust that there is always someone there to take care of them, and that everyone (including legislators and politicians) acts in their interest.

Awards

* Morgan Spanish Prize, Wells College [http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/racyberlib/Quest/interview-laura_nader.html]
* Wells College Alumnae Award, Wells College
* Radcliffe College Alumnae Award
* Harry Kalven Prize (1995), Law and Society Association [http://www.lawandsociety.org/prizes/kalven_prize.htm]
* American Anthropological Association, Distinguished Lecture Award (2000), American Anthropological Association [http://www.aaanet.org/committees/awards/awards.htm#lecture]

Publications

Books

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* . Reprinted in 1996 OCLC|36139409, 2002 OCLC|50922612 and 2005 OCLC|68178289.
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* Reprinted in 2005 ISBN 0520231635.

References

External links

* [http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/nader.html Laura Nader]
* [http://members.fortunecity.com/lohan/interview-laura_nader.html The Drift to War; Laura Nader, Interviewed by John M. Whiteley]
* [http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/November_2000/Q-A_Conversation_with_Laura_Nader.asp Q and A: A Conversation with Laura Nader]
* [http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/726/profile.htm Laura Nader: Speaking out. When silence is part of the problem (Al-Ahram Weekly)]
* [http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0907/nader.html Laura Nader: What's Good About Conflict? (Anthropology News)]