Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Trevor Stack
(University of Aberdeen)
Send message to Convenor
- Track:
- General
- Location:
- University Place 4.211
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 7 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will bring an anthropological perspective to bear on the many debates, old and new, on the relationship between law and public morality.
Long Abstract:
Beyond legal pluralism itself, anthropologists have long paid attention to the normative orders that lie beyond law and sometimes sit in tension with it. Legal systems vary across the world and the borders between legal systems are often blurred and sometimes contentious but so are the borders between law and the enforcing of moral norms. This panel will bring an anthropological perspective to bear on the many debates, old and new, on the relationship between law and public morality. Is it always possible to identify a sphere of public morality? What if anything allows us to distinguish public morality from law? Do the subjectivities of claimants and adjudicators differ across public morality and law? How is authority configured differently? Is public morality always less institutionalised than law? Is the public of law itself different from the public of morality? Does public morality itself get defined by law? Does law have its own morality, or is it just influenced by the morality of broader society? Finally, is it possible to distinguish between ethics and public morality, and if so, how does ethics relate to law? All such questions will be addressed both theoretically and in the light of ethnographic data from across the world, past and present.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 7 August, 2013, -Trevor Stack (University of Aberdeen)
Paper short abstract:
In the paper I compare my Mexican informants' understandings of citizenship with those of anthropologists.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on a series of interviews and case studies carried out in west Mexico, 2007-10. When asked what it meant to be a citizen, interviewees included rights-bearing in their answers but insisted that citizenship was ultimately about living in society, as the holistic ground of public life. Their use of the term reminds us that many different things have been called "citizenship" over the centuries, including aspects of public morality, and that some things now called "citizenship", such as claiming rights on states, have not always been referred to as such. The article paper, though, on the concepts that informants sometimes labeled "citizenship" rather than on their choice of the word itself. Informants sounded like anthropologists in insisting that the subjectivity of the human person could not be reducible to institutional definitions. The difference was that my informants placed still more emphasis on society and had a strongly normative understanding of what living in society involves, which I term civil sociality. In other words, they juxtaposed law and public morality in the form of civil sociality. The article explores the broad notion of "citizenship" articulated by the Mexican informants, or more precisely their juxtaposition of law and public morality, drawing out the methodological, ethnographic, historical, theoretical and normative implications, including for the anthropology of citizenship.
Devanathan Parthasarathy (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes issues of law and morality in a largely middle class led anti-corruption movement in India, in a wider context of social dominance and widespread inequality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the on-going widely popular anti-corruption movement in India which has raised a demand for a new law to create a powerful ombudsman. This movement is characterized as a political playing out of the aesthetic of the moral - the campaign has a predominantly moral as opposed to an ethical basis. The socio-political outcomes and contexts of this movement need to be reflected upon against the deeply hierarchical nature of Indian society. Reversing Charles Taylor's dictum about the relation between social hierarchy and liberalism, the paper attempts to complicate the debate on power, inequality, plural legal orders, and the politics of law(s). The movement's refusal to utilize institutional mechanisms and available political practices to address the problem of corruption, is not unrelated to 'public' perception of corruption in purely moral terms, the corrupt as polluters if not the polluted. Ideas about corruption and the corrupt fit well with notions of danger as shown by Mary Douglas - danger originating from the 'other' who are deemed to be dirty, unclean, polluted, and hence morally inferior and unfit to govern. Versions of rule of law approaches exemplified in the homogenizing tendencies of anti-corruption institutional alternatives are seen to sit uncomfortably with the demands of a plural, diverse, and deeply unequal society. Corruption itself is seen in narrow moral terms, ignoring the corrupt practices of the socially dominant - men, upper castes, or ethnic majorities.
Lourdes Salazar Martinez (UAN)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to discuss the contradictions that entail out of the tobacco companies actions to improve corporate social responsibility. In the specific case of tobacco production, where exploitation, corruption and moral values are inseparably linked.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the contradictions that surround tobacco production. Ethnographical information will be collected over the next 12 months (from August 2012 to August 2013). This ethnographic study is an endeavour to better understand the reconstitution of social relations. Research material will be pulled from two tobacco regions (one in Mexico and the other in the United States) that are linked by the imposition of neoliberal restructuring projects.
Firstly, notwithstanding the efforts of the largest tobacco companies such as Philip Morrison and British American Tobacco towards corporate social responsibility, exploitation at the bottom and corruption within the industry are ever present. Tobacco companies search for areas where anti-smoking laws are more flexible; for example, they have benefited from the corruption that characterises the Mexican legal system. The Mexican government have procured good deals for the tobacco companies by way of subtle manoeuvre.
Secondly, relations among the actors within the various stages of tobacco production demonstrate historical differentiation. Differentiation can be noted between indigenous migrant workers and mestizo day labourers in the Mexican tobacco fields and between black and white, and black and white and Latino immigrants in the Kentucky tobacco fields. Such distinctions have been central to the production of tobacco as racialization has been an effective method of control.
Thirdly, people do not plant tobacco only for profit, but also to follow family tradition. Moreover, the tobacco production is linked to certain core national values in Mexico and the United States.