Law, Culture, and Ritual

Law, Culture, and Ritual PDF Author: Oscar G Chase
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814716792
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
"Oscar G. Chase studies the American legal system in the manner of an anthropologist. By comparing American 'dispute ways' with those of other systems, including some commonly believed to be more 'primitive, ' he finds interesting similarities that challenge the premise that we live in a society regulated by a rational and just 'rule of law.'" --New York Law Journal"A witty and engaging endeavor. . . . A good contribution to our professional knowledge, and it is a must reading." --Law and Politics Book Review"After reading Law, Culture, and Ritual, no one could ever again think that our legal proceedings are nothing more than an efficient method of discovering truth and applying law. Oscar Chase effectively uses a comparative approach to help us to step back from our legal practices and see just how steeped in myths, rituals and traditions they are. Scholars will want to read this book for its contribution to comparative law, but everyone interested in American culture should read this book. Chase shows us that there is no separating law from culture: each informs and maintains the other. Law, Culture, and Ritual is a major step forward in the rapidly expanding field of the cultural study of law." --Paul Kahn, author of The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship"Having allowed ourselves to be convinced (wrongly) that we are the most litigious people in the world, Americans have become obsessed with finding (quick) cures. Oscar Chase's book sounds a salutary warning. By presenting striking comparative examples that shatter our parochialism, he forces us to examine the cultural roots of dispute processes." --Richard Abel, Connell Professor of Law, UCLA LawSchoolDisputing systems are products of the societies in which they operate - they originate and mutate in respons

Law, Culture, and Ritual

Law, Culture, and Ritual PDF Author: Oscar G Chase
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814716792
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Oscar G. Chase studies the American legal system in the manner of an anthropologist. By comparing American 'dispute ways' with those of other systems, including some commonly believed to be more 'primitive, ' he finds interesting similarities that challenge the premise that we live in a society regulated by a rational and just 'rule of law.'" --New York Law Journal"A witty and engaging endeavor. . . . A good contribution to our professional knowledge, and it is a must reading." --Law and Politics Book Review"After reading Law, Culture, and Ritual, no one could ever again think that our legal proceedings are nothing more than an efficient method of discovering truth and applying law. Oscar Chase effectively uses a comparative approach to help us to step back from our legal practices and see just how steeped in myths, rituals and traditions they are. Scholars will want to read this book for its contribution to comparative law, but everyone interested in American culture should read this book. Chase shows us that there is no separating law from culture: each informs and maintains the other. Law, Culture, and Ritual is a major step forward in the rapidly expanding field of the cultural study of law." --Paul Kahn, author of The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship"Having allowed ourselves to be convinced (wrongly) that we are the most litigious people in the world, Americans have become obsessed with finding (quick) cures. Oscar Chase's book sounds a salutary warning. By presenting striking comparative examples that shatter our parochialism, he forces us to examine the cultural roots of dispute processes." --Richard Abel, Connell Professor of Law, UCLA LawSchoolDisputing systems are products of the societies in which they operate - they originate and mutate in respons

The Law of Possession

The Law of Possession PDF Author: William S. Sax
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190275766
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Rituals combining healing with spirit possession and court-like proceedings are found around the world and throughout history. For example, a person suffers from an illness that cannot be cured, and in order to be healed he performs a ritual involving prosecution and defense, a judge and witnesses. Divine beings give evidence through human oracles, spirits possess their human victims and are exorcized, and local gods intervene to provide healing and justice. Such practices seem to be the very antithesis of modernity and many modern, secular states have systematically attempted to eliminate them. Why are such rituals largely absent from modern societies, and what happens to them when the state attempts to expunge them from their health and justice systems, or even to criminalize them? Despite the prevalence of rituals involving some or all of these elements, The Law of Possession represents the first attempt to compare and analyze them systematically. The volume brings together historical and contemporary case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, and argues that, despite consistent attempts by states to discourage, eliminate, and criminalize them, such rituals persist and even thrive because they meet widespread human needs.

Ritual: A Very Short Introduction

Ritual: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Barry Stephenson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199943583
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual

Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 17

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Book Description
This work is an abridged version of 82 Miss. L.J. (2013), which examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States' world leader status as having more to do with culture than crime. This approach has been largely overlooked by legal scholars, yet ritual studies enhance understanding of law and legal institutions. A ritual perspective illuminates the religious history of criminal justice, challenges traditional dogmas that hold punishment as a rational response to crime, and explains why some people must suffer so that others may feel secure.

The Ritual of Rights in Japan

The Ritual of Rights in Japan PDF Author: Eric A. Feldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779647
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The Ritual of Rights in Japan challenges the conventional wisdom that the assertion of rights is fundamentally incompatible with Japanese legal, political and social norms. It discusses the creation of a Japanese translation of the word 'rights', Kenri; examines the historical record for words and concepts similar to 'rights'; and highlights the move towards recognising patients' rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Two policy studies are central to the book. One concentrates on Japan's 1989 AIDS Prevention Act, and the other examines the protracted controversy over whether brain death should become a legal definition of death. Rejecting conventional accounts that recourse to rights is less important to resolving disputes than other cultural forms,The Ritual of Rights in Japan uses these contemporary cases to argue that the invocation of rights is a critical aspect of how conflicts are articulated and resolved.

The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals

The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals PDF Author: Albert D. Pionke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317017382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures of pre-professionalism provided to Oxbridge undergraduates; of oath-taking in a wide range of professional creation and promotion ceremonies; of the education, promotion, and public practice of Victorian barristers; and of Victorian Parliamentary elections. A final chapter considers the consequences of rituals that fail through the lens of the Eglinton tournament. The uneasy place of Victorian writers, who were both promoters of and competitors with more established professionals, is considered throughout. Pionke's book excavates Victorian professionals' vital ritual culture, at the same time that its engagement with literary representations of the professions reconstructs writers' unique place in the zero-sum contest for professional status.

Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society

Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society PDF Author: Max Gluckman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351498150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
What can we learn from tribal societies about the ways in which, in a variety of social settings, groups of men resolve their conflicts with other men? In order to answer this question, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society compares nearly forty case study societies, most of them in Africa, in their reconstructed pre-colonial tribal condition, comparing their small-scale social relations to their large-scale social context. At the outset Gluckman explains to the reader that custom is the focus of interest of all types of anthropology. Yet his approach manifests a strong interest in economy, politics, and social relationships.In the volume, Max Gluckman offers a succinct version of a lifetime of opinionated analysis. This material is organized by theme and the ethnographic examples appear as brief illustrations of theoretical questions. Discussed here also is the relation between disputes and struggles for power within the context of mechanisms of social control and stability.In addition, Gluckman presents a step-by-step survey of the cumulative development of the anthropological analysis of tribal institutions, from the nineteenth century to the present, and supports the argument that anthropology is a science rather than an art. The new masterful introduction by Sally Falk Moore, along with a new postscript of Gluckman's professional activities and publications, provides newcomers to the work of Gluckman with deep insights into the contents as well as contexts within which the great anthropologist worked.

Culture in the Domains of Law

Culture in the Domains of Law PDF Author: René Provost
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107163331
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.

The Cultural Defense

The Cultural Defense PDF Author: Alison Dundes Renteln
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195154030
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Publisher's description: In a trial in California, Navajo defendants argue that using the hallucinogen peyote to achieve spiritual exaltation is protected by the Constitution's free exercise of religion clause, trumping the states' right to regulate them. An Ibo man from Nigeria sues Pan American World Airways for transporting his mother's corpse in a cloth sack. Her arrival for the funeral face down in a burlap bag signifies death by suicide according to the customs of her Ibo kin, and brings great shame to the son. In Los Angeles, two Cambodian men are prosecuted for attempting to eat a four month-old puppy. The immigrants' lawyers argue that the men were following their own "national customs" and do not realize their conduct is offensive to "American sensibilities." What is the just decision in each case? When cultural practices come into conflict with the law is it legitimate to take culture into account? Is there room in modern legal systems for a cultural defense? In this remarkable book, Alison Dundes Renteln amasses hundreds of cases from the U.S. and around the world in which cultural issues take center stage-from the mundane to the bizarre, from drugs to death. Though cultural practices vary dramatically, Renteln demonstrates that there are discernible patterns to the cultural arguments used in the courtroom. The regularities she uncovers offer judges a starting point for creating a body of law that takes culture into account. Renteln contends that a systematic treatment of culture in law is not only possible, but ultimately more equitable. A just pluralistic society requires a legal system that can assess diverse motivations and can recognize the key role that culture plays in influencing human behavior. The inclusion of evidence of cultural background is necessary for the fair hearing of a case.

Ritual, Text and Law

Ritual, Text and Law PDF Author: Richard F. Gyug
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351149903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Reflecting the range of their honorand's interests, the essays in Ritual, Text and Law provide a stimulating and panoramic exploration of the interrelated fields of liturgy and canon law in the Middle Ages, chiefly through the scrutiny of texts and their transmission. Roger Reynolds' scholarly work has not only considered the relations between law and liturgy, but has also focused on liturgical practice and the evolution of rituals, paleography and the often complicated relationships between canonical collections, in particular the southern Italian Collection in Five Books. Due in large part to Reynolds' research, the fields of medieval canon law and liturgy are now recognized as fundamental elements of medieval religious and intellectual history that shed light on medieval Christian belief and practice. The studies are grouped thematically under the headings of 'Ritual' and 'Text and Law'. Each section has an introduction by the editors, in which they survey recent developments in the study of medieval canon law and liturgy with reference to Reynolds's own research, provide historical context for the individual studies, and draw attention to the ways in which the studies reflect current concerns. Individually, the contributors offer new viewpoints on key issues and questions relating to medieval religious, cultural and intellectual history, particularly of the period c.900-1200, and especially the Italian peninsula. Collectively they illuminate the interaction of medieval Christianity and its rituals, as well as the relationship of the secular and the sacred as transmitted in liturgico-canonical texts from the time of the early church to the 14th century.