Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village

by Laura Nader

Book Overview

A Stanford University Press classic.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804718105
• ISBN13: 9780804718103
• Release Date: November 1991
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Anthropology is false, phony,non-science. Journalism really.

Anthropology is phony, non-science. Journalism really.For the record: Laura Nader is a professor at U.C. Berkeley Anthropolgy department. I took a cultural anthropogy class from her. I also took classes in astronomy, physics, chemistry, math etc. From this, I learned there true science subjects that is mathematical, experiment-based and phony, false, fake, pseudo-science subjects like anthropology. Anthropology is what is called "bone-head", "mickey mouse", "for dummies" area of study....... not worth the time to study.Laura Nader's book is really journalism, chit-chat with the locals. The far, far leftists that she is, she develops it in a grand theory of imperialism, power, and structure. All this is just nonesense. Readers should buy this book to see the false, phony, non-science as compared to the true natural sciences to see anthropology is really a bunch of armed chair tourists running around with the natives. Please do not major in anthropolgy in college and this book is a good example. It is hard to believe people actually get paid to teach this subjects or write this type of book.

A brilliant ethnographic exposition on social control

Professor Laura Nader of U.C. Berkeley has penned an amazing work. At first glance Harmony Ideologyseems like a fairly mundane anthropological work on Zapotec Indians of Mexico and their law. The realityis quite different. Although slightly wordy, Nader's description of Zapotec dispute resolution is lively and usually interesting. She examines law cases in the spirit of Llewellyn and Hoebel's classic The Cheyenne Way, although Nader includes analyses cases that do not come to the authorities for resolution. This makes Nader's work both subtler and more accurate. Nader was the first legal anthropologist to emphasize with rigor that the users of systems of dispute resolution help shape and define it, and the study of legal systems must therefore emphasize disputes in all stages from formation to resolution (or nonresolution). In her analysis of the promotion of Christian harmony as a means of social control, Nader is nothing less than brilliant. She expertly uses through history and sociology to expose the motives and methods of Zapotec social control. And like any great work, Harmony Ideology uses facts from a narrow subject foreign to most readers' experience and applies them in such a way as to enlighten our own culture.