Law Anthropology And The Constitution Of The Social
London School of Economics and Political Science Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title www.cambridge.org 9780521831789 Cambridge University Press 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective...
Contents
Notes on contributors page viii 1 Introduction the fabrication of persons and things 1 Alain Pottage 2 Res Religiosae on the categories of religion and commerce 3 Scientific objects and legal objectivity 73 Bruno Latour 4 Legal fabrications and the case of 'cultural property' 115 Tim Murphy 5 Ownership or office A debate in Islamic Hanafite jurisprudence over the nature of the military 'fief', from the Mamluks to the Ottomans 142 6 Gedik a bundle of rights and obligations for Istanbul artisans...
Introduction The Fabrication Of Persons And Things
Each of the contributions to this book addresses the question of how legal techniques fabricate persons and things. In exploring that question, and in asking just what 'fabrication' means, each chapter focuses on a specific historical, social, or ethnographic context. Given that these contexts, and the modes of institutional or ritual action which they disclose, are quite varied, this book does not aim to provide a general theoretical account of the fabrication of persons and things in law....
Contributors
Engin Akarli is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History at Brown University. He has taught at several universities, serves on the editorial board of Islamic Law and Society, and is the author of several publications including Political Participation in Turkey 1974 , Belgelerle Tanzimat 1977 , and The Long Peace Ottoman Lebanon, 1861-1920 1993 . Susanne Kuchler is Reader in Material Culture Studies in the Department of Anthropology, University College London....
Semantic potential
Thomas' theory of the innate autonomy of Roman legal institutions develops the notion that legal concepts or categories are the resources from which res and personae are fabricated. The competences and capacities of persons and things are contained in the semantic potential of these categories, and are drawn out by rhetorical techniques which actualise the potential of a given convention or formula by means of argumentation. In that sense, the entities that surface in legal procedure are really...
Reference and production
Bruno Latour's approach to legal reference is a development of his ethnography of the scientific laboratory, in which the old configuration of persons and things, or subjects and objects, is displaced by the concepts of hybrids, translation, humans non-humans, and associative action.42 These concepts have now become quite influential, so it may be sufficient to point to one particular illustration namely, the concept of 'circulating reference' that is developed in Latour's case study of soil...
Actualising bodily potential
Conventional techniques of personification and reification are opened up to ethnographic comparison by exploring the potentialities contained in 'body'. Marilyn Strathern takes the question of bodily form as the basis for an analogy between Western and Melanesian conventions of personification and reification. What is in question is the production of bodily 'wholeness', that is, the way in which the body is -or is not - reified as a determinate thing. 'Wholeness' in this sense is one particular...
Institutional fictions
Yan Thomas' essay on the category of the 'pure' in Roman law proposes the most restrictive specification of legal institutions. This contribution should be set in the context of Thomas' historical anthropology of Roman law, which has been developed through a number of now celebrated studies in institutional technique. Reductively, one might say the central or fundamental question is that of institutional reference how do legal categories relate to the world 'outside' the institution For Thomas,...