Justin Richland has published “The State of Hopi Exception: When Inheritance is What You Have” in Law & Literature. Here is the abstract:
This essay asks after the potentialities and desires generated by the epistemological limits that animate Hopi tradition as a mode of inheritance. Every effort by Euro-Americans to give “order” to Hopis via two dominant modalities of modern intervention–law and science–have regularly and repeatedly confronted their exceptions among aspects of Hopi life. It will be argued that the obdurate qualities that Hopi culture, society, and language present to Euro-American ways of knowing resonate with tropes of tradition and its inheritance generated by and between Hopis themselves, revealing that Hopis operate in something like a state of exception where their negotiation of epistemological limits animate potentialities that exceed their own moments of authoritative prescription, generating a largely dispersed sovereignty. Moreover, as the lines and limits by which this Hopi exceptionalism is generated and dispersed come to give Hopi traditional knowledge the form of property, and its transmission the character of inheritance, they produce a nostalgic, possessory desire among Euro-Americans to “know” Hopis, even as (and arguably because) these limits result in a Hopi sociality that defies the techno-rational modes of production that reside at the heart of contemporary Euro-American state orders.
Turtle Talk 