Whatever you think of the practice of bride kidnapping, think again.

Gulnaz Naamatova, a visiting scholar from Kyrgyzstan, is in my human rights class. Or rather, I am in hers.  She is the one already working at an international human rights organization focused on rights for women. Unfortunately I could only come to the second half of the presentation she and Andrijana Covic, a scholar from Serbia, gave entitled International Perspectives on Violence Against Women.  I was coming directly from my immigration law class where family violence and disproportionate consequences between the sexes are no stranger. As I walked in, they hit the lights. Movie time.

The documentary, Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, had a bizarre effect on me and did much to further my understanding of how NGOs must approach the issues surrounding women’s role in traditional societies. The film was made in Osh, the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan and in the mountains on the border with Uzbekistan. Gulnaz pointed out afterwards that it could have been filmed anywhere in her home country, even in the capital Bishkek.

The first ten minutes set me up for the wrong documentary frankly. The camera was filming a family in a rural village house getting ready to go kidnap a bride. The father was getting drunk and told the camera that the girl’s (potential kidnappee’s) family was asking too much for her so only thing to do to get revenge was to kidnap her. The man’s son to whom this captive would be married was a little less bold in his proclamations to the camera but said that he needed a wife and the family needed someone to milk the cows. The mother of the family (soon to be mother in law?) told the camera matter-of-factly that she was looking forward to the extra hand in the fields.

The family then drove into the city and waited around for a certain girl, asked for her whereabouts from the young girl working behind the counter at a vodka shop, and then apparently gave up on their first target and kidnapped the vodka shop girl. Girls are everywhere. If you don’t get the first one, move on to the next. A bit like fishing, no?

Shockingly the camera was allowed in the house to film the heart-wrenching scene that followed: the girl sobbing and begging to be released, saying she was too young, saying she was the wrong girl, refusing the bridal veil. The men of the house and village milled about outside and played pick up volleyball in a dirt yard while the women in the family huddled around the captive using both carrot and stick to calm her down. Most of the women themselves had been kidnapped and tried to convince her she had better stay, that her family was in agreement, that she would come to love her husband. In the end she was allowed to leave because she wouldn’t agree. The family cursed her as she left and told her that she would never find a good husband and that her children would grow up to be drunkards.

If you would like to watch the full film it is available at in the law library’s Koren Center. I won’t give you a play by play here. I will say however that the narrative ended up in a very different place than where I had presumed it started. It followed four families in their efforts to catch a bride for their son, and one family of a victim of bride kidnapping who had mysteriously hanged herself after being kidnapped. With the exception of the family that had been delivered their daughter’s corpse, the young women who were kidnapped who stayed were shown in the end to be happily living with their husbands.

The men, given almost equal screen time, became not the enemies you believed at the beginning, but just ‘pawns’ (if I may use a term applied to them in the Q & A afterwards) in that society’s  backwards marriage ritual that was taught and reinforced by the older generations.

Bride kidnapping was made illegal in 1994 but you can probably guess how well that law is enforced. One in three women in rural Kyrgyzstan are forced into marriage. Kyrgyz people say that 1 in a 100 marry for love. Other telling aphorisms:  many tears begin a good marriage; in love a woman yields, a man takes; a girl stays where her stone is thrown. You get the picture. This practice of bride kidnapping is deeply entrenched in the psyche of a large segment of the population. If one had a million dollars to throw at the cause, it would not be as simple as holding a workshop on “how to meet people your own age so your father didn’t have to kidnap your future wife” – although that may help.

Gulnaz shared after the film that even in educated circles bride kidnapping is a bit of a non-issue.  It happens but what can one do about it? Her female friends joke about the best ways to ensure that the family will let you go: curse a lot, drink alcohol, etc.  The realities facing women  in Kyrgyzstan didn’t hit home for Gulnaz until, while still in Kyrgyzstan, a male friend of hers asked her to marry him. She lightheartedly declined, but then he asked only partially sarcastically what would happen if he kidnapped her. Even though it was a joke, she suddenly realized that it could happen to her too.

Eradicating a practice that is so widespread and serves a legitimate purpose – albeit by means that are violent and primitive – is a difficult task. I predict that with time and with the education of women, bride kidnapping will become more symbolic than real. Gulnaz told us about a female friend of hers who wanted to be kidnapped by her boyfriend’s family. When she was, she didn’t know what to do because she knew the family expected her to cry… she did cry, but out of happiness.

John Comaroff is an engaging speaker who delivers his words with a distinctive rhythm and cadence. His presentation for the Baldy Center’s Theorists and Jurists series in late October, for those that missed it, is available to watch on video here. Possessing a gift for storytelling and an ability to move deftly between the anecdotal and the theoretical, not to mention a voice fit for radio or TV, Comaroff grabbed the audience’s attention in 509 O’Brian Hall right from the start and never relinquished it. He spoke for nearly an hour about the spectral nature of violence and rampant crime in South Africa, recounting stories of the diviner detectives, super-cops and preternatural policing that have arisen in response and captured the public’s imagination in the process. Along the way, Comaroff drew parallels with literary detectives, talked about the mystic elements of detection, and pondered what all of this might tell us about law and the metaphysics of dis/order in the postcolony, and perhaps elsewhere in the late modern world.

Comaroff began his lecture with an epithet from a novel by Michael Stanley, which is actually the pen name for the South African writing duo of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, creators of the popular detective series set in Botswana featuring the colorful and endearing Detective David “Kubu” Bengu. His selection of a quote from a pair of writers working as a team was felicitous considering that Comaroff’s own paper—as he readily pointed out—was the product of a collaborative research and writing project with his wife, Jean, with whom he has frequently and productively worked in the past. The epithet states: “Every successful detective harbors a spark of the mystic.” As Comaroff later explained, detection “is good to think with” because, he said, “it has never truly been separated from the divine arts.” Although writers like Edger Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle emphasized the application of inductive reason and the necessity of a sharp intellect in solving crimes, Comaroff noted that “their prose simultaneously undermines their hyper-rationalism.” Or put another way, he maintained, “Their detectives always retain a certain mystique.”

Comaroff described his talk as “a narrative about detection, about the law, and about the enigma of social order in one corner of the late modern world.” The bulk of his remarks focused on specific instances of what he called “preternatural policing” in order to “throw light on the law, on longing, and on the paradox of sovereignty in this particular time and place, and perhaps even in the world at large.” The particular time and place refers to South Africa after the transition to majority rule in 1994, where “murder rates have become diagnostic of violence run amok.” I’ll forgo a description of his three main examples, which were drawn both from media accounts and from the Comaroffs’ own fieldwork in South Africa (see Sara Korol’s earlier post following the event for a brief summary of them), and will focus instead on how Comaroff linked these stories together and the larger questions he raised concerning their significance.

On the one hand, Comaroff cast these stories as “peculiarly parochial” since they are rooted in the context of South Africa’s metamorphosis from “a racial state” under authoritarian rule “into a democratic postcolonial polity.” The high levels of crime and corruption that have allegedly accompanied this transformation have fed a growing sense of anxiety in South African society over the post-apartheid state’s ability or even willingness to police itself, or in Comaroff’s words “to monopolize the means of violence.” The task of maintaining law and order, he asserted, has become increasingly subcontracted through the proliferation of private security companies and private police by which the state has “privatized the means of force.” All of which suggests that, “there might be an inherent contradiction between popular empowerment and the sovereign force of law.”

On the other hand, Comaroff noted that these stories may not be altogether unique to South Africa and that “echoes” can be heard in many other parts of the late modern world. Similar narratives are found in places like Latin America and post-Soviet Europe, where scholars have noted that high levels of crime and a profusion of violence have accompanied the transition to democracy and popular rule. The feelings of insecurity, the sense that “crime takes on phantasmic proportions,” which appears to have marked this transition, should not be viewed as conditions restricted to postcolonial states: “A culture of popular punitiveness is characteristic of criminal justice, political rhetoric, and the spirit of the law in much of the post-Cold War West.” To demonstrate “that order is somehow spectral” in other parts of the world as well, including the United States, Comaroff offered a quote by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, who purportedly remarked, “Government alone will never solve the problem tearing at the fabric of our society. For the faithful, whose numbers are growing, only God will do that.”

In extending the discussion to other parts of the world, Comaroff was clearly drawing on some of his own recent work, particularly Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, which he edited with Jean Comaroff and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. A number of the themes in his Baldy Center talk were reprised from their introduction to that volume and other writings, which perhaps explains the reference to “further adventures” in the title of his talk. Issues that were dealt with there, such as the cartographies of disorder, the fetishism of the law, and the similarities exhibited in both postcolonies and much of the global north in this regard, were also touched upon in his talk. Comaroff appears to be most interested in the way that “the metaphysical basis of order itself” is being called into question in many parts of the world.

As a way of opening a window onto these issues in the context of South Africa, Comaroff focused on the stories of people like Jackson Hopani, a detective in the Limpopo Province who was featured in the news media in the summer of 1997. Hopani stood out not simply because of his skill at catching criminals, but also because of his methods. Comaroff explained that he “moved between the forensic and the oracular, between detection and divination, exchanging his police uniform, his gun, for the dress and the demeanor of a traditional healer. …He was, in short, South Africa’s first officially recognized diviner detective.” Comaroff attributed the interest that this story generated to “the charismatic appeal of characters like Hopani,” which is derived from their ability to discern the mysterious patterns underlying the widespread violence and to solve seemingly inscrutable crimes. Such figures offer the promise that lawlessness can be restrained and that order might be restored.

The desire for protection from the forces of disorder also suggests something deeper at work here. Speaking of the law enforcement officials that he calls “diviner detectives” or “super cops,” Comaroff commented: “Their uncanny efficacy real or imagined draws attention to the disturbing absence of sovereign law, a fate of fatal exile from the ideal of proper state protection.” Here perhaps lies the true charismatic appeal of figures like Hopani and the others, as well as the larger meaning of their stories: Comaroff suggested that they “are stand-ins for a sense of a profound lack” or even an “ontological absence.” He sees in these stories a “yearning for order as a kind of ontological authority, one that comes of drawing a clear line between law and lawlessness, thus to reduce the mysterious dimensions of violence unbound to more mundane, manageable forms.” In other words, these stories potentially reveal “a longing also for law as a source of ontological order, capable of deciphering the mystery, of reading the clues in a world in which violence and its motives appear increasingly spectral, strange, [and] surreal.”

I am very sorry that I attended but one complete session of the Baldy Center’s symposium Friday entitled “Thinking Beyond the Nation-state: Empires, Diasporas, and Indigeneity”.  As I slipped into the Center at 2:20PM, my first impression of the speaker was that she must have had five too many cups of coffee because she was breathlessly stumbling over the sentences in her presentation and purposefully skipping slides in a bizarre race to the end, although I wasn’t sure whom or what she was racing.  Since I had missed the beginning I didn’t pressure myself to take notes but perused the schedule instead. Oh I see… no wonder she’s rushing. They were an hour behind schedule. This is what happens when you line up twenty scholars to present between 9am and 5:30pm. Please tell us in 15 minutes or less  what you have dedicated the last year or so of your life to.

I believe I lucked out though, the panel I caught was fantastic. “Immigrant Women and Belonging” was comprised of a scholar from UB and two from the University of Toronto, the institution with which UB had collaborated to bring this symposium about. First up was Kritika Agarwal who by far had the best presentation style I have seen yet at the Baldy Center. She actually talked to us, and did not just showcase her literacy in a public forum. She presented an essay on sexuality and authenticity among young Indian immigrant women.  She had interviewed her frie – I mean, subjects on their experiences being second generation Indians, and how they balanced their families’ pressure to submit to an arranged marriage with sexual freedom that was decidedly not “authentically Indian”.

Although there were a range of experiences, some general trends were apparent. Most of the young women considered themselves authentic. (Agarwal pointed out early on that whenever she used the word “authentic”, we should consider it to be in quotations because she wasn’t concerned with defining Indian-ness in universal terms.  Rather, she was interested in how her subjects individually conceived of Indian authenticity.) But the women had stopped including being chaste in this definition. They all were quite proud of being Indian – after perhaps a period in their lives when they had tried unsuccessfully to be more American – but they considered most important the fact that they were followers of the Hindu religion or spoke the language (Hindi? Punjabi?) or could cook Indian food.

The pièce de résistance (according to me) was her finding that a lot of young women planned to let either their family or friends eventually arrange a marriage for them and so would end up with an Indian spouse after this period of dating.  This would re-authenticate them in the eyes of their family. This reminded me of my dentist who is a beautiful, charming Indian American woman exactly my age from Michigan.  As my mouth is full of cotton pads and fluoride treatments, she tells me that it’s really important for her to find not only an Indian man, but a Syrian Christian.  I ask her as I spit if her family is arranging a marriage for her and she laughs. Her family is too progressive for that,  this is something she wants for herself. I tell her once she meets Mr. Syrian Christian Indian Right, she should not have any trouble convincing him to marry her.

A man in the audience asked Agarwal  in very flowery and academic language if she had studied how Indian women think about dating other minorities, like African Americans, for instance. She was very flustered and said after thinking for a moment that she had never thought about that, but it was a very interesting question and that [pause] it would be quite out of the question for most Indian families to have their daughters date a black man. Later after another question was fielded by another panelist, Agarwal piped up and re-addressed the question and the inquirer, wanting to clarify her initial response.  She reiterated that it was a very interesting question indeed and said something about Indians being considered ‘model’ immigrants – though this did little to clarify anything. Perhaps she was slightly uncomfortable because the asker himself was African American. She said it would be something she could research in the future… but she didn’t know of any Indian women who were dating black men. Latinos and Asians, yes. African Americans, no.

The second panelist, Nadia Lewis, presented her research with Iraqi women in Toronto. She was attempting to figure out how the women perceived of Iraq as a unified nation, and what it meant to be Iraqi. The Sunni women she interviewed not surprisingly thought of themselves as Iraqi, as did the Christian (Chaldean) Iraqi women and the Kurdish Iraqi women.  Though the Christian women downplayed the Pan-Arabness that the Baathists had tried to instill in the population by highlighting the Mesopotamian mythology/fertile crescent story/biblical foundations for their claim to being in Iraq. The Kurdish women on the other hand thought of themselves as the ‘original Iraqis’ because the hills where they were from were populated before there were any Arabs in Iraq, and way before there was any Iraq to speak of.  The Kurdish women said that if the Kurds ever gained independence from Iraq they would give up their Iraqi citizenship in a heartbeat. (As an aside, when I was in Canada a few months ago, my cab driver was Kurdish, and he is the sole person I have ever met who thanked me for my (former) president’s actions in his country.) None of the women considered the Jewish or Armenian populations in Iraq to be ‘Iraqi’, tending to categorize them as parts of a larger diaspora of peoples separate from Iraq. So is there a unified idea of Iraq? Short answer seems to be ‘no’.

The third presenter, Nel Coloma-Moya, talked about the effects of a racialized and gendered labor market for immigrant women of color in Canada. I do not have much to say on her presentation because she skipped half of her paper, partly because her co-presenter couldn’t make it and partly for reasons of time.  As I said, they were an hour behind.  She basically was linking Foucault’s theories on the rise of biopolitics  and biopower in the 17^th and 18^th centuries to modern-day labor market trends that prioritize flexibility and dispensability over stability and predictability – at the expense of immigrant women of color. The part of the paper that linked the 17^th century to today was missing sadly.

The woman sitting next to me was from Boston and had come to UB as a prospective graduate student in American Studies. I welcomed her to the university and told her I looked forward to seeing her a future Baldy Center events. She thought the Baldy Center was just splendid. The symposium was a good example of the type of ambitious event the Baldy Center is capable of.

Well.

Michael Giudice (joo-DEE-chay) gave a modestly-attended talk today entitled Analytic Jurisprudence and Contingency. The description given on the Baldy Calendar gives those who were not in attendance a quite accurate sense of what it was like to be at the talk. Giudice, a visiting professor of philosophy from York University, presented a yet-unpublished paper, which drew a lively debate afterwards on what is LAW. The question of WHAT IS LAW is not something that most people in law school grapple with on a regular basis, but analytical jurisprudists (did I just make up that term?) think about this question a lot. One might even say that this is the main thing that they think about. They not only think about it, they try to answer it. This is what defines who they are.

There is something else that analytical jurisprudists have in common: they all have read the works of H. L. A. Hart (those who came after Hart of course, the discipline goes back quite a bit beyond him) who is one of the most influential writers in the modern field. Giudice is no exception. And the most fun thing to do for someone in a field is critique – or for those less confrontational types, have a dialogue with – its most influential writer.  Hart and others built careers on figuring out how to describe the law in universal and neutral terms so that one would know Law when they saw it. And also, so that the concepts and vocabulary they developed could be transferable (could ‘travel’) to other places. His three commonalities – or at least what Giudice kept coming back to – were the elements of “coercion”, “morality”, and “social rules”.  If Martians came down to Earth and asked what this thing called ‘law’ is, it would be more useful to them to describe it in terms of coercion, morality, and social rules than, say – to dismissively gesture towards the Constitution and turn back to doing homework.

Giudice was arguing though that trying to distill elements of what law is wherever it is found only gets you so far, and that for some forms of ‘law’, it is rather a distortion to pretend that you can describe it in purely analytical terms. I wish I could give some examples, but since he didn’t give us many examples I won’t do the work for him. But we can imagine that the law as we think of it and the law in Sicily as run by the mafia perhaps would be strange bedfellows sitting under the same headboard.

Then there is the other extreme. Not trying to be analytical at all. I didn’t catch the name of the theory but I did catch a main theorist: Brian Tamanaha, a legal theorist who apparently did quite an exhaustive cross study (Nazi Germany, indigenous tribes, etc) of the different forms of law across the whole world. He rejected the notion that one could find an essence of law that would fit all the realities of law. He basically said you shouldn’t even try to do this. (That sounds like a challenge, no?)

So gosh, there must be some middle ground… Wait… what’s this?…. Hart actually wasn’t completely conceptual. In his formula, he allowed for contingency. When studying, for example, why judges rule they way they do, he noted the presence of a social rule. The social rule may change depending on what judge, what country, what culture, etc, but there was always some social rule at play. I believe Hart called this the ‘Any Reason’ Thesis. Brilliant. We don’t know WHAT the rule is, but we know there is one. So really, Hart was embracing a bit of contingency without getting himself kicked out of the analytical jurisprudist club. And Giudice ran with it. Giudice was proposing that when we decide to grapple with this question of What is Law, we should proceed not by presumption but use revisable categories, and welcome contingency relationships our constructions.

You think I’m kidding about getting kicked out of the club by trying to bring in discussions of contingencies? Those contingencies that anthropologists and sociologists try to account for? This is a very serious matter. Giudice was a visiting scholar at Oxford and noted that a new department was formed called something like “Law and Society” which was relegated to a separate building and not allowed to be a part of the law faculty, even though they were teaching the same texts. Not unique to Oxford, this is an illustration of the proprietary and protective nature the legal theorists exhibit towards the supposed purity of the science of law. Talking about people and culture just make things too messy. Not what civilized legal theorists do.

During the questions, after the only other law student had slipped out (I’m sure she had somewhere to be) the handful of UB professors, at whom Giudice was clearly delivering his presentation, started debating the aforementioned question. One professor pointed out that Giudice seemed to be proposing a ‘cluster concept’ of law, in that there are 10 or 12 elements that one could possibly find, and if you found enough of them, then there is law. How many would be necessary and of what nature were these elements I do not know because again, no one was going to give examples for my benefit. But when the question turned to whether “etiquette” is law, this same professor became very animated and threw out a purposefully ridiculous example to prove his point: what if he sneezed on his hand and then approached you with it extended as a greeting? (This would make the reasonable person exclaim ‘Outrageous!’) This is clearly against etiquette, but would anyone say he had broken a law? Not in our understanding of it. So law isn’t the only thing that is exerting social control. What if a gang of teenagers with AK-47s walked from Guinea to Liberia and made everyone they encountered do what they say.  Are they the law? They certainly have control but would we consider what they say the law? (Answer: If they wanted you to say they were the law, then, yes.)

Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done in this field. Michael Giudice is up for it. And I will turn back to my homework.

Afterthought: So how important is it to be able to answer the question What is Law? Would you think that before becoming an attorney you’d have to be able to answer this? Would you think that at the very least as a attorney you should know whether what YOU are applying or relying upon is the law? Giudice, as an aside, mentioned that he knows many transnational attorneys who still aren’t sure whether what they’re working with is the law. Go figure.

Re-posted from Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log, courtesy of the author, Rebecca Tushnet:

William O’Barr, Duke University, Alternative Forms of Advertising Regulation: Comparative Notes from China, India, Brazil, and the US

From most people’s perspectives, law involves writing a will and buying a house, little more. The caselaw doesn’t touch ordinary people’s lives or make up the stuff of law in practice.

Comparative perspective from big countries. China: very highly regulated; India and US: moderate; Brazil: low. Primary methods of regulation are very different. China: government. India: cultural taboos. US: Industry tries very hard to preempt government regulation through various self-regulatory bodies, especially for TV ads, staying one step ahead of regulation. Brazil: the ad agency decides what to do.

Pepsi makes a pattern ad they’d like to use all over the world, but will have to be reshot in various ways for local regulations and ambiance. He showed a popular Pepsi ad with Michael J. Fox; Chinese censors didn’t like it because it showed a number of inappropriate behaviors—running down a fire escape in a nonemergency situation, crossing in the middle of the street, gangs in the city, etc. Chinese version: similar dialogue, very different behavior—he crosses at a crosswalk! Chinese regulators didn’t want to show antisocial behavior. Not an isolated instance.

India: (incidentally, here’s the Indian version of that ad—worth a look, especially in light of the Chinese changes) A private company started competing with the government in condom distribution; people didn’t like how thick the government issue condom was, though it was promoted heavily for population control. Chose the name Kamasutra to emphasize its greater sensuality. Can’t show men and women kissing in movies or on stage; this is a huge taboo. Nor can a man touch a woman’s hips or most parts of her body in an ad. Ad agency works within the context of taboos. The condom ad included a prominent framed picture of the couple—showing that they weren’t engaged in casual sex. Ads can be erotic—he showed a condom ad that probably couldn’t be exceeded in the US—and yet there are still taboos.

Brazil: Creative strategy has become divorced from the product—lost the purpose of selling stuff. “Ghost ad”: made specifically to enter into international competition, but don’t show on TV or in magazines. There’s just no regulation. Ketchup ad: won a competition, didn’t show at home. O’Barr then showed an ad in which boys repeatedly ogled and spied on women, to advertise candy—forget government regulators in the US; this wouldn’t make it past the network censors for concerns over sexualizing kids, objectifying women, general creepiness.

Ramsey: How long does ad approval take in China?

A: Several months. Tedious. Many are rejected and need to be replaced/remade. China has a good side: what the government is requiring is for advertisers to think about whether the values promoted in ads are antisocial and thus contrary to the population’s larger interests. He wishes we could do some of that in the US.

Bradford: OK, so what about niche marketing to homosexuals in China?

A: Wouldn’t get talked about at all: standardization of the ideal family. Same thing with any totalitarian regime: they have an idea of what the images ought to be and enforce them heavily. Also doesn’t allow regional minorities to appear—multiculturalism doesn’t show up in China.

Bartholomew: former student did a presentation on Chinese ads. An ad in which a boy bought two Cokes so that he could stand on them and get tall enough to press the Pepsi button, then abandoning the Cokes, would never be allowed.

A: That’s because comparative ads aren’t allowed. You can’t say your car is best because everyone knows the other brands work fine.

He thinks Brazilian ads are exceptionally cool, and Chinese ads are fascinating because the ads thrive in the midst of this totalitarian state. And why can’t we advertise condoms in this country?

Stauffer: That Brazilian ad is really disturbing, particularly in dialogue with the papers from earlier in the day about the recruitment of women’s bodies to use sales—the social education that boys are supposed to be voyeurs, stick a mirror under the teacher’s dress, etc. Unlikely to be ads in which little girls fantasize about men’s bodies. That doesn’t have the same social meaning.

A: Note that these things are all competing to be the standard for global advertising. The US doesn’t come out very well. US ads are no-nonsense, WYSIWYG, not beautiful, not creative, not generalizable because the American population looks different from every other population—the set of people chosen to represent multiculturalism is unrepresentative everywhere else (blacks, Hispanics, Asians along with whites); too many facts/reasons compared to French/Japanese ads. We’d be wise as Americans to realize how very culturally specific these issues we’ve been talking about today are.

There’s no pretense of multiculturalism in ads elsewhere—they don’t bother to put Muslims in ads in France. American racial codes are different—a code for communicating sensitivity to diversity that is uniquely American, so we show three kids brushing their teeth, one white, one Hispanic, one Asian—an improbable social situation created to show multiculturalism. But there are a small number of niche markets that warrant special treatment in the US—Hispanic, African-American, gay/lesbian; now Asian, though ads tend to make them honorary whites.

Daniel Horowitz, Smith College, David Riesman: From Law to Social Criticism

Lawyer who made his mark as a sociologist in The Lonely Crowd; turned his back on the law. Buffalo was actually critical to his evolution; he came to the law school when the dean was trying to turn it into a national law school, and began to build his career as a sociologist, pushing the boundaries of what was proper to study. He was interested in empirical data, using it to examine the law of finders. Riesman worried about defamation of Jews in Europe. Tried to deal with that in law review articles about the conflict between defamation and free speech. What linked his legal training with his work in sociology? The Lonely Crowd is not obviously a book written by a lawyer.

Horowitz proposes: the link is concern for the conditions under which democracy can continue to flourish under adverse conditions. He began with the problem of political apathy, and tried to figure out how to preserve individual autonomy from attack by totalitarianism in Europe and consumer culture in the US. Often misread as pessimistic.

At several points, he focused on advertising, suggesting that educating consumers might promote autonomy. Wanted “leisure counselors” to educate Americans, especially children, how to consumer, and wanted market research to uncover consumer desires and meet them. Understood the individualizing potentials of mass media, contrary to Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and tried to understand how consumer culture individualizes people and provides a source of resistance to the pressure of the peer group. Feedback and the importance of consumers talking back to corporations and advertisements. The other-directed personality promises flexibility and self-expression, and ads/market research could help Americans resist conformity and seek autonomy. He was countering the pessimism of the Frankfurt School.

Bartholomew: What episodes from popular culture did he find hopeful?

A: Later essays, yes. Charlie Chaplin, American jazz are commonly cited by writers of this bent. Women & sex in The Lonely Crowd—he moves towards women’s liberation through sexual experience: women are acting in their homes more like courtesans.

Alberto Salazar, York University: Consumer Counter-Advertising Law and Corporate Social Responsibility in Canada

In Canada, the law chills consumer expression/counteradvertising, which prevents democratic demate and social deconstruction and reconstruction of the commodification of life. McDonald’s litigated in the UK over the use of “McDollars, McGreeedy, McCancer, McMurder, McDisease” for 6 years, finally losing at the European Human Rights Commission. Court said: lack of government aid to consumers to prove the accuracy of their criticism against a corporation is a violation of their freedom of expression.

In Canada, defamation law is considered private. Defenses are costly, and there’s no anti-SLAPP legislation. Most people are sympathetic to consumer expression and yet the law doesn’t facilitate it.

Example of problems: discourse on obesity, anorexia, healthy eating. Change in law could stimulate behavioral change, past the “public interest responsible journalism defence,” which is not clearly available to ordinary nonjournalist citizens.

Ramsey: Do firms use TM law as well?

A: Hasn’t studied that.

Ramsey: How rigid is the standard? Negligence?

A: No, truth. Even nonnegligent falsehood leads to liability, and you have to prove truth.