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- Convenors:
-
Raluca Bianca Roman
(Queen's University Belfast)
Sarah Bennison (St Andrews University)
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- Stream:
- Evidence
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the anthropological significance, political relevance, and the theoretical/methodological challenges of community-focused legal archives. In doing so, the panel seeks to address the issue of representation and responsibility, through an analysis of 'paperwork' as 'patchwork'
Long Abstract:
What are the challenges faced by anthropologists working with legal texts at the community or ethnic-group level? Who speaks for whom within such spaces and how can the anthropologist account for all voices while considering the historically contextualised nature of such materials? This panel aims to explore the anthropological significance of community-focused legal archives (legal letters, lawsuits, statutes, petitions and other normative inscriptive media), particularly in contexts in which such materials were produced in times prior to the 'ethnographic present'. Furthermore, the panel seeks to address questions of power, identity construction, ethnicity and indigeneity in official domains which aspire to be inclusive in their representation of all members of the represented group yet are often essentialising and selective in their representation. Finally, it aims to look at the ways in which we can adequately account for the common yet methodologically challenging presence of self-editing, additions/corrections, in-text disagreement(s). In other words, what does the evolving, amended, and at times silenced nature of these 'legal' texts tell us about the constructed, politically-charged nature of community 'issues' and how does authorship translate into issues of representation? We invite abstracts from anthropologists and interdisciplinary scholars working on these issues, from a diversity of ethnographic contexts. Papers concerning the construction of categories (i.e. ethnicity, community, nation, etc.) within legal documents and their importance in the shaping of the ethnographic moment are particularly welcome. We also encourage reflexive engagements concerning not only the challenges but the potential resolutions concerning the anthropological value of such materials.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Fernanda Pirie (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
What do laws mean? I use the interpretative challenge of a Tibetan legal code to ask who makes laws and why. This means paying attention to the lawmakers' ideals and aspirations, rather than assuming practical goals. The fruitfulness of this approach is discussed by comparing other historic laws.
Paper long abstract:
What do laws mean? This paper starts with the interpretative challenge of a legal code produced by nomadic pastoralists in eastern Tibet in the early twentieth century. Looking beyond contemporary explanations, I ask about who made it and their wider purposes and aspirations. This suggests reading apparently practical rules about compensation as exemplary statements about justice, tribal autonomy, and participation in a wider Buddhist world, rather than assuming that the texts were intended as practical forms of regulation and control. The fruitfulness of this approach is emphasized, in this presentation, by comparison with other historic legal texts, which have been studied by scholars working in very different contexts. These include the detailed, esoteric, and profuse laws created in medieval Ireland and Iceland, laws which took religious forms in apparently impractical ways in sub-Saharan Africa, and documents recording slavery transactions in medieval Dubrovnik and central Tibet which seem to have denied the reality of the underlying transactions. In each case, I suggest, the apparent purposes of the laws mask deeper ambitions and considerations, which can only be grasped by asking seriously about who the lawmakers were and what they may have been trying to achieve. In this presentation I discuss the challenges of this approach and the limits of the work of interpretation.
Jonas Bens (Universität Hamburg) Baudouin Dupret (CNRS) Sigurd D'hondt (University of Jyväskylä)
Paper short abstract:
We argue that anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with legal texts is based on the failure to conceptualize them as an integral part of the practice of the law. Drawing from our work on the International Criminal Court we develop an approach for an ethnography of legal texts.
Paper long abstract:
Even after the writing-culture-debate anthropologists still see reading and interpreting texts as largely antithetical to the idea of ethnography—except when it comes to a self-reflection on the ethnographer’s own writing. In this paper, we reject this narrow notion and make a plea for a concept of ethnography that includes texts as the object of ethnographic investigation. The production, implementation, and interpretation of legal norms depend upon the spoken word and its material inscription in writing. One cannot properly analyse the workings of the law without engaging with doctrinal texts, legal decisions, case files, and court transcripts. We argue that anthropologists’ reluctance to engage with legal texts is based on the referentialist misunderstanding that legal texts merely reflect the practice of the law in a more or less accurate way and the inability to conceive of them as an integral part of such practice. For us, an ethnographic approach suggests that legal texts must be read with three aspects in mind: (1) in an ethnomethodological sense, as the practical accomplishment of particular legal actions (the relevance of which is provided by the specificity of the legal setting); (2) in a Bakhtinian linguistic-anthropological sense, as intertextually embedded in multiple local and trans-local dialogical networks and text trajectories (which connect them with other discourses in- and outside the courtroom); and (3) in a legal-anthropological sense, as encapsulating legal practitioners’ ongoing engagement with a developing corpus of legal theory (and as expressing their metapragmatic strategies for reading and producing such theory).
Tomas Ledvinka (University Hradec Králové)
Paper short abstract:
Nineteenth-century Prague was a place of struggle over the ethnic origin of legal-archival objects between Czechs and Germans. Drawing on several examples I illuminate that the objects were indispensable in constructing the ethnic communities as "folk" or "nation".
Paper long abstract:
Today, legal archives are usually relegated beyond constitutional concerns. Nineteenth-century Prague, once a capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Habsburg Empire, was nevertheless a place of intensive struggle over the ethnic origin of legal-archival objects between emerging modern nations of Czechs and Germans. Cultural leaders on both sides were often also archive explorers who attempt to nationalize the internal diversity of local laws within the Kingdom in the past and the present. They strategically used archival-legal objects in order to make sovereignty claims and construct the ethnic community in question through contradictory categories of "folk" or "nation". One example of this struggle is the ethnic status of Old Prague town law and the ownership of Prague castle in particular as both material and symbolical objects and things documented by both historical legal manuscripts and ancient symbols. This historical "constitutional ethnography" suggests that legal-archival objects were used in a twofold way. Archive explorers employed folkloristic and ethnographic (meta)discursive practices in order to ensure their legal and constitutional power as an embodiment of ethnic communities' continuous presence in the kingdom and also displaced the objects into the category "past" in order to secure community progress in period terms.
Jeanine Dagyeli (University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes to discuss conflicts of interest that arise in the process of working with legal, mostly land-related documents from 19th and early 20th century Central Asia, especially where they touch sensitive historical issues that inform contemporary identity.
Paper long abstract:
The past and the hegemony over its interpretations have become an important resource in Central Asian efforts at building a national, post-Soviet identity. In this enterprise, archival holdings, often insufficiently catalogued and explored, have become a contested terrain. Prior to the 1920s, political borders in Central Asia were radically different than today, and did not mark ethnic boundaries. As one result of the so-called national delimitation during the early Soviet period, Uzbekistan holds today the majority of all documents left from the bureaucracies of the predecessor states, parts of which lie in the neighbouring countries today. This is a privilege but also challenges efforts at writing a “new, national” history on the basis of the documents. There is an intense fear from those politically responsible that the “wrong things” might turn up in historical documents. This paper will focus on the interpretations of archival documents and wants to discuss possible ways of addressing sensibilities connected with legal and other bureaucratic evidence. Taking the example of a set of petitions from 19th and early 20th century southern Uzbekistan, it will explore the agendas of rural inhabitants, mostly farmers, who tried in various ways to engage courts and the emir to interact on their behalf. Over the past decades, these documents have seen very different interpretations some of which collide with either local or national interests because they may address sore spots like compulsory relocation or sedentarization of parts of the population.