218 Conclusion
to capture the ongoing social-contextual creativity of actual legal problems and
decisions. On the other hand, the nihilist despair into which disappointed skep-
tics then fall, concluding that legal results reflect “what the judge ate for breakfast”
or naked economic interests, underestimates the powerful regularities of pragmatics
in cultural process.^41
Here, however, cognitivists and anthropological linguists part company, for
whereas cognitivists look to the contextual and grounded character of human cat-
egorization for pragmatic regularities, linguists examine the actual process by which
these categories (and other, messier regularities in human communication) are
given life in speech. Although cognitive analysis focuses extensively on the language
of metaphor, metonymy, and cultural categorization, it does not examine language
as a system in use. Because of its central concern with the way individuals internal-
ize cognitive maps, the school of cognitive theory on which Winter relies tends to
brush quickly by issues of social and group processes, where anthropological lin-
guistics and sociolinguists explicitly examine structures of social interaction and
cultural exchange. Depending on what (metaphorical!) perspective we adopt, we
can see this either as a conflict (with each side holding warring visions of how prag-
matics order social and legal knowledge) or a happy division of labor (with each
school attending to important and complementary issues).^42 Whatever one’s van-
tage, it is striking to note that both approaches urge us to abandon a polarized logic,
in which the language of law is (or should be) either entirely determinative of out-
comes or a transparent reflection of social context. Similarly, I would urge that we
abandon a dichotomy that views linguistic exchange as either entirely devoid of
power dimensions or as completely determined by social power.^43
From the perspective of law and literature, James Boyd White has similarly
appealed for us to take seriously the particular combined linguistic-cultural-ethical
orientation that characterizes law as a field. He grants that law should not be taught
“without economics, or politics, or psychology, or history” (and I would add soci-
ology and anthropology, at the very least!), but White also insists that none of these
should be permitted to completely displace the study of law
as a distinctive activity of mind and imagination.... It is, and should be taught as, a
discipline of thought and argument with its own structure, its own elements, at the
center of which is the activity of claiming meaning for human experience, individu-
ally and collectively, and doing so in a language that is at once a source of authority
and itself subject to perpetual revision.^44This leads White to advocate a “revived case method” as the ideal format for law
teaching, one in which a law student will approach cases as practice for the real
world, learning to think and live
at once with the materials of law, its language and institutions, and with the realities
of the world: the needs of her client, the demands of the other lawyer, the character
of the judge and jury. And this offers [the law student] a life in which... she is called
upon to have and recognize real commitments.^45In many ways, White is calling for an approach that linguistic anthropologists would
endorse: one that takes seriously the indigenous language and culture of the legal