Laura Nader

Laura Nader is an American anthropologist, born in 1930, who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1960, becoming the first woman to hold a tenure-track position in its anthropology department. Her field of legal anthropology examines dispute resolution and law across cultures, drawing especially on long-term fieldwork in a Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico, presented in Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (1990). Her widely cited 1969 essay called on anthropologists to practice studying up, turning ethnographic attention toward the culture of power, institutions and affluence rather than only toward the culture of the poor and powerless, a call that reshaped debates over the discipline's proper subject matter. She is the older sister of consumer advocate Ralph Nader.