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- Convenors:
-
Martyn Wemyss
(Goldsmiths)
Geoffrey Hughes (University of Exeter)
Narmala Halstead (University of Sussex)
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- Chair:
-
Insa Koch
(University of Sankt Gallenis)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 22 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates how law is imbricated with the production and dissolution of a multiplicity of lifeworlds. Moving away from legal pluralism’s emphasis on hybridity and indeterminacy, we consider how boundaries and distinctions are reified (and contested) through socio-legal regimes.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary globalization evokes radical imaginaries of an emerging global commons that breaks down borders and brings people together amidst a wholesale dismantling and fragmentation of existing commons and movements towards isolationism, ethnic exclusivism, reterritorialization and new extractivist economies. This panel asks how legal orders mediate the new forms of claims-making (and impunity) that these projects facilitate, grounding analyses in specific lifeworlds.
If politics is relations among worlds as Jacques Ranciere has argued, law can be seen as regulation/reglementation among worlds. Building on recent work on multiplicity (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018); Kathryn Yusoff [2018]; Sylvia Wynter [2003], we ask how law emerges, moves, interpellates, captures and incites across, between and within ‘worlds’. These might be the social, cultural, domestic, geographic, temporal, illusory, or fugitive worlds of more traditional social theory or individualized structures of feeling. Moving beyond legal pluralism and metaphors of hybridity, we ask how law participates in the creation and dissolution of worlds--and what law is appropriate to what Blaser and de la Cadena term a ‘world of many worlds’ and the attendant modes of subjectivity which make this ‘worldliness’ possible. How do legal notions ‘travel’ and translate across worldly divides, and how do they interpellate and subjectivise those bound by divergent legal-moral orders and the socio-cultural worlds which generate them? Possible topics include:
-Decolonizing anthropology
-The interstitial spaces of postcolonial law
-Indigenous rights movements
-International law and commercial regulation
-Regulation in online spaces
-Anthropogenic climate change
The Panel is supported by Journal of Legal Anthropology
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with legal volunteers among minority communities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, this paper focuses on abstraction as a feature of legal form to understand why those marginalized by the state take recourse to the law to pursue their claims.
Paper long abstract:
At a moment of escalating violence against religious and caste minorities in India, civil society organizations working in the arena of legal policy are increasingly directing their efforts towards conducting 'capacity-building exercises'. The objective of these programs is to impart legal awareness and provide practical training to selected members of marginalized groups, enabling them to act as legal intercessors for their communities. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork among graduates of one such program in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh as they attempt to put into practice their incipient expertise, engaging with the law through routine activities such as filing complaints and pursuing entitlements. Anthropological scholarship often inhabits an interval between law and the social, exposing their disjuncture to reveal the distorted and lethal ways law gets translated into everyday life. While several authors aim to interrupt legal discourse by showing how it is predicated on an impoverished understanding of the social, I approach the issue from a contrasting vantage point to understand how marginalized groups strive to bridge this interval and make the law intelligible to their milieux. Focusing on abstraction as a feature of legal form, I trace how law gets absorbed in everyday life as the intercessors seek to prepare their communities for encounters with local law enforcement. Building on recent work in postcolonial thought, queer theory, and contemporary art practice, I propose that the abstraction of law emerges as a resource for those on the margins unable to transparently represent themselves.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about the investigation into the June 2000 Concorde disaster and what it reveals about the role of law in the production of technological worlds. It suggests that the central mechanism of technology's worlding is the alternation between the general and the particular that law implies.
Paper long abstract:
When an aeroplane crashes, two things happen: investigators delve into the question of why this aircraft, under these particular circumstances came to grief, and regulators consider what, in general, the crash tells them about the safety of the type concerned. An air crash, in this sense, takes shape in two different ways: as an irreducibly singular, material happening, and as a sign of risk that needs to be translated into rules. In this paper, I analyse the air accident report into the crash of AFR 4590, an Air France Concorde, which was lost near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on 25th June 2000, and associated documents and regulations. I show how the two faces of the disaster, its material specificity, and regulatory implications, systematically alternate in the way the accident is understood. I argue that this alternation is significant for two reasons. First, because it is the only means by which complex, risky devices like airliners can come into being: big machines have to pass through law to become reality. Second because of the way in which this tacking between happening and rule sheds light on ‘modernity’ in general, and especially the putative ‘Cartesian dualism’ of the moderns.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on a land claim brought by Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya in Belize, this paper analyzes how both radical difference and partial connection between indigenous and non-indigenous worlds have been produced via struggles to define and win recognition for indigenous rights.
Paper long abstract:
De la Cadena (2015) theorizes both radical difference and partial connection between indigenous and non-indigenous worlds, such that they constitute “more than one, but less than two.” Similarly, as indigenous advocates sought recognition for indigenous rights across UN, Inter-American, and state systems of law, they repeatedly produced both the multiplicity that results from radical difference and the partial connection that emerges where distinct worlds intersect. Engaging a land rights claim pursued by the Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya of Belize across Belizean and Inter-American judicial systems, this paper analyzes how indigenous advocates mobilized international human rights law, Inter-American system jurisprudence, the Common Law doctrine of Native Title, and the Belize constitution to position Maya customary tenure practices as both a refusal of Belizean property law and the source of Maya collective property in lands. In the process, they interpellated Mopan and Q’eqchi’ complainants as the collective, culture-bearing subjects of indigenous rights, whose customary tenure practices are grounded in reciprocal relations of respect among humans and the lands with/in which they live. Judges ruled in favor of the Maya, issuing decisions that shaped subsequent indigenous rights claims and judgments across Latin America and the Commonwealth. However, recognizing Maya customary tenure as a legal system neither created nor absorbed by the Common Law, judges refrained from dictating the form that partial connection between indigenous and non-indigenous systems should take. Instead, they directed state actors to negotiate this relationship with the Maya, an on-going process I also explore.
Paper short abstract:
The paper demonstrates how changes in customary law in Botswana respond to historically changing statutory law. Taking a legal realist, living-law approach, it shows that customary court decisions are embedded in notions of equity that also inform wider ideological, critical judicial movements.
Paper long abstract:
Our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how changes in customary law in Botswana have responded to historically changing statutory law. Taking a legal realist, living-law approach, the paper shows that customary court decisions are embedded in considerations of equity that also inform wider ideological, critical movements and processes of judicial innovation and legal reform. Certain changes in unwritten law have a clear trajectory, we argue, and in this sense Tswana customary law, as in the rest of Southern Africa, is to be grasped as ‘living law’, responsive to changing circumstances: although largely unwritten, a corpus of more or less agreed Tswana customary law does exist for any particular time and place. This implies that judges are not simply dealing with an amorphous body of unwritten custom and law, mekgwa le milao. Unwritten law is affected, we show, through customary judicial deliberation in court regarding notions of contemporary morality, of ‘fairness’ (tshiamo) and reasonableness in response to changing circumstances, as Gluckman too, for example, argued. Hence, changes in customary law have been impacted by and impact on the rhetoric and ethos of judicial decision-making. Customary law in Botswana is a semi-autonomous field. Schapera (1970) proposes that Tswana tribal “innovators” have historically had the capacity to introduce legal judgments in response to not only changing circumstances or norms but also changing notions of equity and fairness. Clearly, however, attempts to shape customary law from above against changing local understandings of gender equality or adultery practices, must equally fail.