Author: Lawrence Rosen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521367400
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluation of issues and the shapes of a judge's decision. The Anthropology of Justice is not only the first full-scale study of the actual operations of the actual operations of a modern Islamic law court anywhere in the Arab world but a demonstration of the theoretical basis on which a cultural analysis of the law may be founded.
Author: Lia Kent
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000084744
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Transitional justice seeks to establish a break between the violent past and a peaceful, democratic future, and is based on compelling frameworks of resolution, rupture and transition. Bringing together contributions from the disciplines of law, history and anthropology, this comprehensive volume challenges these frameworks, opening up critical conversations around the concepts of justice and injustice; history and record; and healing, transition and resolution. The authors explore how these concepts operate across time and space, as well as disciplinary boundaries. They examine how transitional justice mechanisms are utilised to resolve complex legacies of violence in ways that are often narrow, partial and incomplete, and reinforce existing relations of power. They also destabilise the sharp distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’ war or conflict that narratives of transition and resolution assume and reproduce. As transitional justice continues to be celebrated and promoted around the globe, this book provides a much-needed reflection on its role and promises. It not only critiques transitional justice frameworks but offers new ways of thinking about questions of violence, conflict, justice and injustice. It was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal.
Author: Michael Bruce Goddard
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Papua New Guinea's village court system was introduced in 1974, partly in an effort to overcome the legal, geographical, and social distance between village societies and the country's formal courts. There are now more than 1100 village courts all over PNG, hearing thousands of cases each week. This anthropological study is grounded in ethnographic research on three different village courts and the communities they serve. It also explores the colonial historical background to the establishment of the village court system, and the local and global processes influencing the efforts of village courts to deal with everyday disputes among grassroots Melanesians.
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479836850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technology From legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.
Author: Othon Alexandrakis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253023262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
What drives people to take to the streets in protest? What is their connection to other activists and how does that change over time? How do seemingly spontaneous activist movements emerge, endure, and evolve, especially when they lack a leader and concrete agenda? How does one analyze a changing political movement immersed in contingency? Impulse to Act addresses these questions incisively, examining a wide range of activist movements from the December 2008 protests in Greece to the recent chto delat in Russia. Contributors in the first section of this volume highlight the affective dimensions of political movements, charting the various ways in which participants coalesce around and belong to collectives of resistance. The potent agency of movements is highlighted in the second section, where scholars show how the emerging actions and critiques of protesters help disrupt authoritative political structures. Responding to the demands of the field today, the novel approaches to protest movements in Impulse to Act offer new ways to reengage with the traditional cornerstones of political anthropology.
Author: Fernanda Pirie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199696845
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
"Questions about the nature of law, its relationship with custom, and the form of legal rules, categories and claims, are placed at the centre of this challenging, yet accessible, introduction. Anthropology of law is presented as a distinctive subject within the broader field of legal anthropology, suggesting new avenues of inquiry for the anthropologist, while also bringing empirical studies within the ambit of legal scholarship.
Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119251486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483
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Book Description
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.
Author: Carol J. Greenhouse
Publisher: Wakefield Press
ISBN: 9780801496783
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
""A most stimulating book.... Praying for Justice is very successful in describing a people's aversion to discord by means of cultural analysis based on sensitive use of ethnographic and archival materials.... There is also the pure interest in figuring out a cultural system that is not of law, but that impacts on law, one that is based on justification rather than command, on participation rather than obedience, a system of handling conflict not requiring the application of human authority.... This book is superlative." A welcome study analyzing the ideology of Southern Baptists in a suburban community in Georgia. Greenhouse's concern is how religious beliefs provide a basis for people's ideas about justice in their social order and how conflicts or potential conflicts are overcome or avoided entirely by invoking religious doctrine.... Her sophisticated analysis of the data is impressive and demonstrates an understanding of Southern beliefs that few scholars have achieved. The strength of this work is in its imaginative explanation of the structural means of conflict resolution. Greenhouse goes to painstaking length to explain the Baptist response to conflict.... She absorbs herself in her data and maintains that delicate balance of scholar and confidant to her subjects."--
Author: Lawrence Rosen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651174X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
In the West, we tend to think of Islamic law as an arcane and rigid legal system, bound by formulaic texts yet suffused by unfettered discretion. While judges may indeed refer to passages in the classical texts or have recourse to their own orientations, images of binding doctrine and unbounded choice do not reflect the full reality of the Islamic law in its everyday practice. Whether in the Arabic-speaking world, the Muslim portions of South and Southeast Asia, or the countries to which many Muslims have migrated, Islamic law works is readily misunderstood if the local cultures in which it is embedded are not taken into account. With Islam and the Rule of Justice, Lawrence Rosen analyzes a number of these misperceptions. Drawing on specific cases, he explores the application of Islamic law to the treatment of women (who win most of their cases), the relations between Muslims and Jews (which frequently involve close personal and financial ties), and the structure of widespread corruption (which played a key role in prompting the Arab Spring). From these case studie the role of informal mechanisms in the resolution of local disputes. The author also provides a close reading of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was charged in an American court with helping to carry out the 9/11 attacks, using insights into how Islamic justice works to explain the defendant’s actions during the trial. The book closes with an examination of how Islamic cultural concepts may come to bear on the constitutional structure and legal reforms many Muslim countries have been undertaking.
Author: Kamari Maxine Clarke
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.
