Background
Carol Jane Greenhouse was born on January 4, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. She is the daughter of H. Robert and Dorothy E. Greenhouse.
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Harvard University
Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
Cornell University
107 S Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Indiana University
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Princeton University
(Anthropologist Carol J. Greenhouse offers an ethnographic...)
Anthropologist Carol J. Greenhouse offers an ethnographic study of attitudes toward conflict and law in a predominantly white, middle-class, suburban, principally Southern Baptist community."A most stimulating book . . . .Praying for Justice is very successful in describing a people's aversion to discord by means of cultural analysis based on sensitive use of ethnographic and archival materials. . . . There is also the pure interest in figuring out a cultural system that is not of law, but that impacts on law, one that is based on justification rather than command, on participation rather than obedience, a system of handling conflict not requiring the application of human authority. . . . This book is superlative."-Law and Society Review"A welcome study analyzing the ideology of Southern Baptists in a suburban community in Georgia. Greenhouse's concern is how religious beliefs provide a basis for people's ideas about justice in their social order and how conflicts or potential conflicts are overcome or avoided entirely by invoking religious doctrine. . . . Her sophisticated analysis of the data is impressive and demonstrates an understanding of Southern beliefs that few scholars have achieved."-American Anthropologist"The strength of this work is in its imaginative explanation of the structural means of conflict resolution. Greenhouse goes to painstaking length to explain the Baptist response to conflict. . . . She absorbs herself in her data and maintains that delicate balance of scholar and confidant to her subjects."-Contemporary Sociology.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801419719/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(Many commentators on the contemporary United States belie...)
Many commentators on the contemporary United States believe that current rates of litigation are a sign of decay in the nation’s social fabric. Law and Community in Three American Towns explores how ordinary people in three towns―located in New England, the Midwest, and the South―view the law, courts, litigants, and social order. Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel analyze attitudes toward law and law users as a way of commentating on major American myths and ongoing changes in American society. They show that residents of "Riverside," "Sander County," and "Hopewell" interpret litigation as a sign of social decline, but they also value law as a symbol of their local way of life. The book focuses on this ambivalence and relates it to the deeply-felt tensions express between "community" and "rights" as rival bases of society. The authors, two anthropologists and a lawyer, each with an understanding of a particular region, were surprised to discover that such different locales produced parallel findings. They undertook a comparative project to find out why ambivalence toward the law and law use should be such a common refrain. The answer, they believe, turns out to be less a matter of local traditions than of the ways that people perceive the patterns of their lives as being vulnerable to external forces of change.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801429595/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Focusing on the problem of time―the paradox of time's app...)
Focusing on the problem of time―the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity―Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself. She argues that time is about agency and accountability, and that representations of time are used by institutions of law, politics, and scholarship to selectively refashion popular ideas of agency into paradigms of institutional legitimacy. A Moment's Notice suggests that the problem of time in theory is the corollary of problems of power in practice. Greenhouse develops her theory in examinations of three moments of cultural and political crisis: the resistance of the Aztecs against Cortes, the consolidation of China's First Empire, and the recent partisan political contests over Supreme Court nominees in the United States. In each of these cases, temporal innovation is integral to political improvisation, as traditions of sovereignty confront new cultural challenges. These cases return the discussion to current issues of inequality, postmodernity, cultural pluralism, and ethnography.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801430615/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Ti...)
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Between 1990 and 1996, the U.S. Congress passed market-based reforms in the areas of civil rights, welfare, and immigration in a series of major legislative initiatives. These were announced as curbs on excessive rights and as correctives to a culture of dependency among the urban poor—stock images of racial and cultural minorities that circulated well beyond Congress. But those images did not circulate unchallenged, even after congressional opposition failed. In The Paradox of Relevance, Carol J. Greenhouse provides a political and literary history of the anthropology of U.S. cities in the 1990s, where—below the radar—New Deal liberalism, with its iconic bond between society and security, continued to thrive. The Paradox of Relevance opens in the midst of anthropology's so-called postmodern crisis and the appeal to relevance as a basis for reconciliation and renewal. The search for relevance leads outward to the major federal legislation of the 1990s and the galvanic political tensions between rights- and market-based reforms. Anthropologists' efforts to inform those debates through "relevant" ethnography were highly patterned, revealing the imprint of political tensions in shaping their works' central questions and themes, as well as their organization, narrative techniques, and descriptive practices. In that sense, federal discourse dominates the works' demonstrations of ethnography's relevance; however, the authors simultaneously resist that dominance through innovations in their own literariness—in particular, drawing on diasporic fiction and sociolegal studies where these articulate more agentive meanings of identity and difference. The paradox of relevance emerges with the realization that in the context of the times, affirming the relevance of ethnography as value-neutral science required the textual practices of advocacy and art.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812243129/?tag=2022091-20
2011
anthropologist educator author
Carol Jane Greenhouse was born on January 4, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. She is the daughter of H. Robert and Dorothy E. Greenhouse.
Greenhouse received her education at Harvard University, graduating from it with a bachelor's degree in 1971 and obtaining her doctorate in 1976.
During her long teaching career, Greenhouse has taught at Cornell University (1977- 91) and Indiana University - Bloomington (1991-2001); she was also a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 1998-99, and Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar in 2015-16.
Currently, Carol Greenhouse holds the position of Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
(Many commentators on the contemporary United States belie...)
1994(Focusing on the problem of time―the paradox of time's app...)
1996(Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Ti...)
2011(Anthropologist Carol J. Greenhouse offers an ethnographic...)
1986Greenhouse is a member of the American Anthropological Association, Law and Society Association, American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Greenhouse married Alfred C. Aman, Jr. on September 23, 1976. The couple has no children.