The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States. By Carol J. Greenhouse. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 328 pp. $59.95 cloth.

The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States. By Carol J. Greenhouse. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 328 pp. $59.95 cloth.In The Paradox of Relevance, Carol Greenhouse offers an important analysis of the discursive politics of the 1990s. That decade, which marks the end of the Cold War, stands as a critical transition in federal policy from a New Deal to a neoliberal approach to the inequities in U.S. society that many Americans considered to have been resolved through judicial and legislative initiatives of earlier decades. By the time the Soviet Union imploded at the end of the 1980s, the global shifttoward neoliberal policies was already underway. Beginning with the presidential veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, the political pluralization of neoliberalism in the United States gained momentum and became the legislative status quo. In this book, Greenhouse shines a light on that process by successfully placing in dialogue U.S.-based ethnographic community studies, fiction, and sociolegal studies published (or republished) in the 1990s.In the first half of the book, Greenhouse sets out the interlocking themes of the book and provides a guide for her close textual analysis of the exemplars in each genre that follow. The first chapter grapples with a debate that, although most explicitly addressed in anthropology, also roiled other academic fields-how best to respond to the elision of race and class that was deemed necessary by lawmakers as they put policies in place advocating personal over governmental responsibility for the wellbeing of people living in the United States. Often expressed as a question of relevance, with scholars divided between "Foucauldian theories of subjectivity... and Marxian theories of class," Greenhouse explains that U.S. ethnographies of the 1990s bridged that divide in an effort to address "minority identities emergent from new local/translocal relations" (41). In her view, therefore, construing the debate as solely epistemological (i.e., how writers of ethnographies represent themselves in relation to those whose lives serve as the basis for their writing) "tended to conceal the extent to which they were political battles in the more usual sense of the term" (44). One solution to the false conundrum of relevance was the production of "artful experiments in U.S. ethnography" that reflected "a deep ambivalence over the power of law to create social change" (44).The second chapter then argues that a "discourse of solutions" became an implicit template for writing about how the "new political mainstream made identity central to market-based social reform" while denying equality of access to the law (70). To further her argument, Greenhouse structures Chapter 3 around quotes from Congressional hearings surrounding key legislative acts on discrimination, welfare, and immigration reform. She creatively reads this legislative history as evidence of "neoliberalism's mainstreaming" (105). With this history in mind, Chapter 4 then lays out a structure of analysis that Greenhouse will use to show how textual and political analyses are intertwined. By revealing how ethnographers shiftregisters in their use of first-person singular in the prologue, main text, and epilogue or envoi of their books, Greenhouse argues that the "narrative code" of ethnographic community studies of the 1990s is best read as allegorical, employing fictional qualities suited for each "author's sensibility as to the limits of actual political and legal institutions" (111).The centerpiece of the book consists of two especially engaging chapters (5 and 6) that first focus on how texts are structured by a discourse of solutions, defined as "the promise and limits of aligning social description with the discourse of federal political debate" (142), and then explores the use of first-person testimony as exemplifying "federal subjectivity" as it "circulates across sociolegal studies, fiction, and ethnography" (176). …