{"title":"Reflections on Cosmopolitan Politesse with Perspectives from Papua New Guinea","authors":"E. Hirsch","doi":"10.3167/JLA.2018.020107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/JLA.2018.020107","url":null,"abstract":"In this issue’s forum, Nigel Rapport takes his lead from Georg Simmel, who asked how society is possible. Simmel notes that every individual has a sense of being connected to others, and it is through these connections that the individual has a ‘grasp of the whole complex as society’ (1971: 8). But this understanding is only realised through particular, concrete interactions. The individual in Simmel’s sociology, then, can only exist as an individual through this engagement with others – with, in short, ‘society’. It is this set of relations, it seems, that makes society possible. However, Simmel suggests that the picture an individual gains of the Other through personal contact is based on certain distortions – classifications of a general and conventional nature, some of which may be alienating. At the same time, Simmel also indicates that the individual simultaneously remains separate from society: ‘It seems, however, that every individual has in himself a core of individuality which cannot be re-created by anybody else whose core differs qualitatively from his own. . . . We cannot know completely the individuality of another’ (9–10).","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"143 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86193609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cosmopolitan Politesse","authors":"N. Rapport","doi":"10.3167/JLA.2018.020106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/JLA.2018.020106","url":null,"abstract":"In an earlier work (Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology, 2012), I considered a solution to the ‘problem’ of society as identified by Georg Simmel. The fact that we only come to know the interactional ‘Other’ by way of distortion, by virtue of the imposition of alien and alienating labels, categories and taxonomies, Simmel (1971) described as ‘tragic’ (cf. Rapport 2017). We distort the Other’s identity when we ‘know’ them in the conventional and collectivising terms of a symbolic classification of cultural reality. In response, I argued for a linguistic and behavioural style of public address and exchange, and an ethos of good manners, that I termed ‘cosmopolitan politesse’. This was an interactional code by which we presumed the common humanity and the distinct individuality of whomsoever we engaged with, but classified the Other in no more substantive fashion than this. We accepted that in our social interactions we were engaging with an individual human other – ‘Anyone’ – and not with a representative of some more substantive class: ‘a woman’, ‘a Swede’, ‘a Jew’, someone ‘working class’, ‘primitive’ or ‘pious’, and so on.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90270096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea","authors":"M. Strathern","doi":"10.3167/JLA.2018.020109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/JLA.2018.020109","url":null,"abstract":"Open to the journal’s remit to consider how the legal may enter social constructions of persons or might change meaning in terms of everyday interpretations, I am enchanted by Nigel Rapport’s redescription of anthropological practice in this issue’s forum. Such practice, he suggests, is a scaled-up version of everyday human practice, at least in so far as ‘the common humanity of our research subjects becomes the basis of our being able to understand their . . . [diverse] difference[s]’. Like Anyone, anthropologists use generalised human means to judge local actions. Acting in this way (when it becomes an ethic) is a mark of the cosmopolitan politesse he would see as a potential vector of a Western, liberal, moral vision, with its sense of the realities of human life, a knowable ontological foundation, in which individuals flourish when they sustain their own personal and collective worlds. Such a vision also mobilises a certain capacity for justice embedded in the everyday. The relation between this philosophically conceived notion of justice and ‘the legal’ is left to the imagination. But Rapport has given us much to think about with respect to how one might find or redefine what is of legal concern beyond the public arena of the state and its bureaucracy, and thus in ‘other’ kinds of social space.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89293596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love is Love","authors":"Dylan Kerrigan","doi":"10.3167/JLA.2018.020111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/JLA.2018.020111","url":null,"abstract":"Trinidad and Tobago’s anti-gay laws can be traced back to British colonialism and European imperialism. Their existence today and their consequences for human lives in Trinidad and Tobago during the past one hundred years are a local entanglement of historic global hierarchies of power. On 12 April 2018, in the High Court of Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Justice Devindra Rampersad, in a form of judicial activism, trod where local politicians have not dared and intervened in such coloniality by delivering a legal judgement upholding the challenge by Jason Jones to the nineteenth-century colonial laws in Trinidad and Tobago that criminalise homosexual relations and same-sex loving.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79576314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sentimentalising Persons and Things","authors":"Jonas Bens","doi":"10.3167/JLA.2018.020105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/JLA.2018.020105","url":null,"abstract":"In The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, the International Criminal Court (ICC) tried the destruction of UNESCO World Heritage sites as a war crime for the first time. In this case, the value of things in relation to the value of persons became the central issue. Based on courtroom ethnography conducted during the proceedings and informed by affect and emotion research, this article identifies the rhetorical practice of sentimentalising persons and things as an important process of legal meaning making. Through sentimentalising, all parties rhetorically produce normative arrangements of bodies by way of emotionally differentiating the relevant persons, things and other entities from and affectively relating them to each other. Sentimentalising provides an affective-emotional frame in which to determine the degree of guilt and innocence, justice and injustice.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82033173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bringing into View","authors":"Narmala Halstead","doi":"10.3167/jla.2018.020101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2018.020101","url":null,"abstract":"A new colleague in a recent email communication about this journal posed the question of whether the term ‘legal’ was being put in opposition to ‘illegal’: was there an illegal anthropology? My response must be left in part to the views of other likely interlocutors as to what is or can be evoked when we seemingly endeavour to attach or subdivide anthropology in envisaged specialist areas. The acknowledged spaces to bring out understandings of the legal alongside and within anthropology, in general, through particular frames and representations turn our attention to a dialogical field of knowledge in relation to sociolegal phenomena. I further consider that legal anthropology is not simply, if it ever was, about a type of anthropology called legal, whether opposed to illegal or not, to give a nod to such asides. The wide scholarship eschews any isolated idea of legal in anthropology and incorporates analyses of everyday settings marked, for instance, by implicit and explicit systems of governance and how these are experienced. This also ranges from historical readings of customs and norms to accounts of contemporary rational-legal settings.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"189 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77363649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cutting the Face","authors":"G. Hughes","doi":"10.3167/jla.2018.020104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2018.020104","url":null,"abstract":"The local uptake of new media in the Middle East is shaped by deep histories of imperialism, state building, resistance and accommodation. In contemporary Jordan, social media is simultaneously encouraging identification with tribes and undermining their gerontocratic power structures. Senior men stress their own importance as guarantors (‘faces’), who restore order following conflicts, promising to pay their rivals a large surety if their kin break the truce. Yet, ‘cutting the face’ (breaking truces) remains an alternative, one often facilitated by new technologies that allow people to challenge pre-existing structures of communication and authority. However, the experiences of journalists and other social media mavens suggest that the liberatory promise of the new technology may not be enough to prevent its reintegration into older patterns of social control.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"438 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83680389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}