Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law's territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law's social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as law's speech, new theories of jurisdiction suggest that law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (such as in legal aid intake exchanges, or in the forms of bureaucratic records). Jurisdiction points up how the force of law, and the sovereignty that law's force presupposes, can be seen as being made, and made seemingly unassailable, in the discursive and textual details of law's actual accomplishment. This review considers a segment of legal language scholarship produced in recent decades, while arguing for the ground that language, as juris-diction, always holds for law and sovereignty.

Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how this linkage operates via production formats, participant structures, genre conventions, and ideologies of personhood. We then consider approaches to citation in the domain of legal discourse, an arena that relies on specific, patterned forms of citation that are historically rooted, institutionally perpetuated, and subjectively reenacted. 449 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:449-463. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California -Davis on 02/07/15. For personal use only.

In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo-American peer-reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those forms by social actors caught up in them. The second reveals a concern with the imbrications of political and scientific epistemologies, particularly as they emerge in state policies and actions around issues of public health, the environment, and agriculture. Where they come together is in the number of studies whose objects of inquiry reside at the nexus where science, politics, and markets meet in what they see as the creeping expansion of neoliberal logics and their implications for the state as a political formation. [

This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practices as the multiple calculi of meaning insofar as discourses of argumentation offer explicit moments by and through which members of a single community proffer competing interpretations of troubling acts and events. To support this claim, insights gained from J.L. Austin's treatment of speech act infelicities and legal anthropology's ‘trouble-case’ methodology are employed to inform an interaction-based analysis that explores how competing Hopi interpretive practices are constituted in courtroom discourses between parties to probate disputes before the Hopi Tribal Court.

In 2013, Hopi Tribal representatives met US Forest Service officials to consult on the significance of archaeological sites in the Tonto National Forest. The meeting exemplified the “meaningful tribal consultation” process that federal law requires US agencies to undertake with Native nations. Disagreement persists about the efficacy of such consultations and about why indigenous actors continue to participate in them. In the 2013 consultations, Hopi officials’ contributions shape the interaction into a narrative exercise of juris‐diction, the enactment of normative authority through language. In this way, consultation participants implicitly negotiate which norms—those of Hopi tradition or Anglo‐American law—should govern how the significance of the archaeological sites in question are legally determined.