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Legally Mediated Identity: The National Environmental Policy Act and the Bureaucratic Construction of Interests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Wendy Espeland
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In representing the interests of a group, law may simultaneously construct the subject holding those interests. When groups question the implications of an imposed subjectivity, the politics of identity may become a forum for resistance. I examine law's potential to shape identity, based on a controversial decision affecting Yavapai residents of the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona. A proposed dam threatened to move the Yavapai from their ancestral land. To develop the Environmental Impact Statement required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation adopted a rational decision framework that some Yavapai believed misrepresented them. Their resistance stimulated a reinterpretation of their collective identity, a defense of their distinctiveness, and a reassertion of their right to represent themselves. The effect of this reappraisal was a new appreciation and articulateness about Yavapai distinctiveness, an invigorated sense of their own history and, most important, their enhanced empowerment.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 5: Symposium: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies , 1994 , pp. 1149 - 1179
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Thanks to Mindie Lazarus-Black, Bruce G. Carruthers, john Comaroff, Paul Culhane, Ken Dauber, Paul Friesema, Carol Heimer, Royce P. jones, Elizabeth Mertz, Debra Schleef, Paul Schnorr, Peter Siegleman, David Shulman, john Walton, and the anonymous reviewers for Law & Society Review for helpful comments. Earlier versions were presented at the Law and Society annual meetings, Chicago 1993, the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, the American Bar Foundation, and the Midwest Faculty Seminar. I am grateful to these audiences for their good questions and helpful responses.

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Statute

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