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- Convenors:
-
Fernanda Pirie
(University of Oxford)
Morgan Clarke (University of Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Morality
- Location:
- Magdalen Daubeny
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Laws, rules, and categories are all around us, but so are individualistic practices, strategies, and techniques. In this panel, participants are invited to explore the nature and use of rules, their attractions and limitations, and their relationship to other social practices and resources.
Long Abstract:
Turning from structure to agency, and from law to practice, anthropology has recently had little time for rules. Bourdieu's theory of habitus demands a focus on individual strategy, rather than rule following, and legal anthropologists often emphasize litigants' strategic use of court processes. The new 'anthropology of ethics', too, entails a conscious turning away from legalistic ideas of ethics as a 'code of conduct'. But does this emphasis on the individual, the particular, and the strategic, risk ignoring the place of rules and categories in social life? Laws, rules, and categories are all around us. Explicit rules are attractive in quite local contexts, as village constitutions, and on a much larger scale as trading standards and commercial norms, even when there is no dominant power to enforce them. Legalistic ethics are common amongst 'techniques of the self'. In everyday life, rules make explicit the categories we use to think about and make sense of the world.
This panel invites participants to explore the nature and social use of rules. What it is that makes them attractive? What is the appeal of legalism and its limitations? Even where they are prominent, rules are rarely the only resource to which people turn, however. In projects of government, cross-border trade, or technologies of the self, we often find an appeal to rules next to practices of negotiation, reasoning with examples, and the elaboration of narrative and metaphor. We invite papers that explore both rules and their relationship to other social practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Andrea Nicolas
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that 'negotiating law' and 'following the rules' are not opposite poles of a spectrum of rule-abiding or -rejecting. Based on the example of the ethnic group of the Oromo of Ethiopia, the 'channelling forces' of procedural rule-conformity will be examined.
Paper long abstract:
Procedural legalism and ritualization as a way of 'legalizing' decisions may hint at the importance of ethical precepts and the 'habitus of legal conduct', but also invite to the exploration of legal practice: What do actors do with, or about, rules? This paper argues that 'negotiating law' and 'following the rules' are not opposite poles of a spectrum of rule-abiding or -rejecting. Not only can negotiation be practiced 'despite', or within the limits set by, rules, it can also be done by means of applying them. Similarly, negotiating, or contesting the law can lead to new rules emerging, or existing ones being consolidated. Anthropology needs to theorise 'what to do' with rules, from the perspective of actors.
Based on the example of the ethnic group of the Oromo of Central Ethiopia, who, parallel to village and state courts, follow a 'traditional law' (seera) that is combined with elaborate mediation procedures, the 'channeling forces' of procedural rule-conformity shall be examined. A powerful legal ideology appears to be at work in these procedures that rests upon societal 'codes of conduct' and religious premises of sanctioning through higher forces. Following instances of homicide or other disputes, a virtual 'peacefare' is applied by Oromo elders, religious authorities and judges to get involved parties to agree to peace-making. This raises the question of how powerful the rules of procedure are in themselves, and what means individual actors possibly have to resist. Is the study of procedure, thus, a call 'back to the rules'?
Fernanda Pirie (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation uses historical sources from medieval Tibet to ask about the resources that people draw upon to make ethical decisions, and why they might prefer examples, narratives, and metaphors to legalistic rules.
Paper long abstract:
What resources do people draw upon to make ethical decisions? And to what extent do rules and other resources demand, or make possible, different kinds of decision and judgement?
This presentation uses historical sources from medieval Tibet to describe a moral world in which ethical behaviour was not primarily referred to codes of behaviour. Buddhism presented Tibetans with the Vinaya, a treatise on monastic conduct imported from India, containing detailed rules for behaviour. The idea that ethical behaviour should consist in following religious and moral prescriptions did then seem to acquire some purchase in the region, and over a number of centuries a series of writers attempted to elaborate moral rules for the conduct of the laity. However, alongside these texts they created others, which presented ethical issues in very different ways, using stories, proverbs, metaphors, and aphorisms. These texts contained a very different style of writing, which embodied their moral ideas in concrete examples and stories or expressed ethical principles through abstract and elusive proverbs. These must have demanded reflection, interpretation, and judgement, rather than obedience to categorical and simplifying rules. The lives of most individuals from this period have, of course, been lost in the mists of time, but a study of the texts they might have read and the ideas that must have circulated, indicates the parameters of the ethical world in which they lived.
Siobhan Magee (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research on marriage counselling in Virginia to discuss why rules are frequently centred on numbering and mnemonics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research on marriage counselling in Virginia to discuss why rules are frequently centred on numbering and mnemonics. Contemporary kinship studies argue convincingly that shared homes, property, and sometimes children 'make' kinship and relatedness. But marriage counselors often find that it is the 'shock' of shared domesticity, apportioning household labour and getting to know 'who their spouse really is', that tears couples apart. Numbered rules are close to people's hearts in a context where the US Constitution and the Ten Commandments are daily discursive touchstones; following Schneider, marriage is sometimes taken as the example par excellence of rule-based kinship, of 'the order of law'. I explore the popularity of advice given to couples that focuses on numbering and mnemonics as ways to 'avoid divorce': discuss 30 questions from a Christian workbook before marriage; say 'I love you' four times each day; go on one 'date night' per week. For some, numbered rules embody marriage counseling's straddling of 'art' and 'science'. Numbered rules are obviously ethically consequential because they bring rationale associated with the workplace into the home but they also appeal because linear chronologies are central to therapeutic accounts of lives and relationships. 'Order' becomes synonymous with 'understanding'. The bigger picture sees rules as a surprisingly optimistic mode of (self)-governance: they initiate action that can feel 'unnatural' before it either brings about, or brings back, ways of relating to others that are less easy to order, such as love, or engender new understandings of them.
Ioana Vrabiescu (University of Warwick)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the work of civil society organizations and legal practitioners who are auxiliary to the deportation apparatus in France. Through daily routine these agents abide and create rules and generate trust in the judicial system thus revealing a debatable legalistic gaze on the state.
Paper long abstract:
Within the EU institutional and legal framework, two individual member states - France and Romania - collaborate to identify, arrest, detain and deport thousands of EU migrants within the EU territory. While France operates a complex and massive deportation apparatus, the Romanian state has openly conceded to receive its deported citizens and to assist the French authorities in policing (ir)regular Romanian migrants. Based on multi-sited research conducted in Romania and France, this paper offers an ethnographic research within a shared deportation regime, analysing the site of confrontation and agreement between states structures and the civil organizations or legal practitioners who allegedly contest state policy of deportation. In doing so, it problematizies a legalistic gaze on the state, which follows the liberal legal tradition in conceiving state as complying with laws and its opponents instrumentalizing legalism to correct situations of law infringement. The legalistic gaze, shared by all interviewees in significant different ways in my research, tends to overlook civil servants discretionary power to shift boundaries of inclusion-exclusion and at the same time it disregards the political power to decide over the design and enforcement of migration laws and regulations. This paper engages with debates in deportation studies and it looks into how state and non-state actors constitute a legal imaginary of the state through daily judicial interactions and discursive confrontations on legal terrain. It argues that the legalistic gaze is created at the encounter between state agents and anti-deportation discourses and actions.