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- Convenors:
-
Sophie Blanchy
(CNRS France)
Julia Eckert (University of Bern)
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- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V411
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 11 July, -, Thursday 12 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
Legal pluralism allows competing rules of legal responsibility, and often makes possible the evasion of any. This panel wants to explore processes of the fragmentation of responsibility and responses to them, and of changing relations of responsibility in legally plural situations.
Long Abstract:
Legal responsibility seems to be increasingly elusive in a world in which the perception of increasingly complex global interdependencies makes the attribution of causal responsibility a matter of contestation. The heightened pluralism of legal orders at all levels of governance not only offers competing rules of legal responsibility (and thereby often makes possible the evasion of any) but also fragments the normative base for the attribution of responsibility. This despite global discourses of a unified normative ideal of responsibility as proposed in the Human Rights system and attempts to integrate legal heterogeneity in forms of "multicultural jurisprudence".
Empirical examples of such potential fragmentations and contradictions range from the use of and care for "the commons" to narratives of guilt as established by international criminal law.
In many countries in which land tenure depends on legal pluralism, international claims on the biodiversity (as World Heritage) and the need for Protected Areas raise new questions about responsibilities. Legal pluralism in the domain of kinship and family make also the responsibility for children uncertain in case of divorce or fosterage.
These emerging uncertainties of legal responsibility have engendered diverse forms of disquiet, ranging from vocal demands of accountability, the shifting of legal responsibility into moral spheres, to more quietist de-ontological constructions of responsibility.
This panel wants to explore processes of the fragmentation of responsibility and responses to them; it seeks papers which analyse changing relations of responsibility and trace emerging trajectories of the attribution of responsibility in legally plural situations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 11 July, 2012, -Marina Simic (University of Belgrade)
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with uncertainty in dealing with every day bureaucratic producers in post-socialist Serbia that creates the feeling of prolonged living in-between an older state regime and a newer one. This means that currently there is either chaos ('no law') or not enough of the state, or both.
Paper long abstract:
For many people in Serbia the state together with the system (and its benefits) quite literally disappeared in the 1990s and the new state ceased to perform adequately on different levels. Drawing from my long term fieldwork research in the Serbian town of Novi Sad, I show how my informants' evocations of the law were more about regulating everyday acts, attempts to ensure a standardisation of behaviour and experience in public services. These practices include dealing with every day state bureaucratic procedures including the use of state run public transport, dealing with house bills and access to medical care that can be difficult and burdensome. However, a low level of trust in the state makes people think that even if the rules were followed, there is no guarantee that people would be treated fairly of justly and generate constant state of uncertainty. In everyday terms, this lack of trust mostly refers to the idea that the state is either unable or unwilling to efficiently run its bureaucratic procedures and organization. This kind of idea is very familiar to state formation theorists: the idea of an inadequate state has been severely criticized as taking the 'western' model of the state as the norm and comparing all other examples with that. However, that is different from the ethnographic point I am making: people in Serbia felt they were living somewhere between an older state regime and a newer one, which meant that at that moment, there was either chaos or not enough of the state, or both.
Tomas Ledvinka (University Hradec Králové)
Paper short abstract:
Justice within jurisprudence etc. is usually related to a monilitic society. This paper examines the possibility of relating justice to the mosaic of social groups of society and explores how the generality of the law of the state made this relation between law and justice uneasy for jurisprudence.
Paper long abstract:
Although the concept of justice is intuitively understandable, its defining causes no less trouble than defining the concept of rights or legal awareness. Wolfgang Fickentscher, categorically states that "justice is an integral part of law as a whole." The modern jurisprudence, however, reduced the importance of justice, converted it on to non-legal normative level as a concept of moral rightness. Justice as a legal theme survived within jurisprudence in disintegrated, latent, incomplete state of knowledge. Anthropology of law focuses rather on notions of justice or rather injustice on the level of social groups. Generality of the modern laws of the state made this relation between law and justice rather uneasy as the distribution (categorization) of society, regrouping, resettlement of tribes, clans, families is an important function of law for the stability of the whole society has become unclear. I focus therefore on tension between intragroup perspective which locates the liability to the individual who can best prevent his or her breaching law, and intergroup perspective of justice, which places the entire responsibility to a foreign group or rather the group' authorities. The concept of tension between inside and outside rules is uncertain and still newly defined by social mechanisms as the intragroup phenomena can be "internalized" and intergroup "externalized", and vice versa.
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA))
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the legally plural situation regarding agrarian reform in Brazil and the Landless Workers' Movement's (MST) response.
Paper long abstract:
The MST is the largest social movement in Latin America and its struggle for agrarian reform is premised upon the 'occupation' of land by encampment. Depending on one's political stance, this action is either termed 'ocupar' (to occupy) or 'invadir' (to invade). The two differing terms illustrate the pluralistic and contradictory nature of the Brazilian legal system, as in civil law, what the MST does is illegal, as it violates statutes surrounding the right to private property and therefore constitutes trespass. But under constitutional law, the MST claims legality, due to Articles 184 and 186 of the Brazilian constitution of 1988. Article 184 requires the Brazilian government to 'expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function', while the key details of Article 186 surround how this criteria is to be met and how to define 'social function'. In this way, the MST argues that it is justified in occupying unproductive estates, as they are not fulfilling 'adequate use'.
Much confusion results from this legally plural situation and repression of the movement's activities often varies depending on the relevant state governor's personal stance. However, alongside the legal ambiguities that such a system creates, there are also more personal uncertainties. Once appropriated, movement members can enjoy free use of their land and pass it to inheritors. However, the land remains the property of the government and therefore cannot be sold or traded, which causes problems, for example, when a married couple wishes to divorce. As any children generally stay with the parent who has access to means of earning, such decisions can have life-changing consequences. What is of interest in this situation is how the movement has developed an uncodified quasi-legal system to determine outcomes, a system that is entirely parallel to Federal Brazilian law and more located in personal moral spheres.
Henrike Florusbosch (University of Michigan)
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes up the shifting of legal responsibility into moral spheres in the case of a protracted land conflict in Mali, in which a legal vacuum leads local actors to seek recourse in moral rather than legal orders.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes up the shifting of legal responsibility into moral spheres in the case of a protracted land conflict in Mali. This conflict, which first became acute in early 2008 and continues up until the present, has so far escalated into violence and large-scale im-prisonment as well as an increasing number of new conflicts that keep cropping up in its wake. On a theoretical level, the case is of interest because these subsidiary conflicts, which I documented in the summer of 2011, all play out in the domain of ethics, as if to underscore the lack of satisfactory judicial resolution of the original dispute. In my analysis, I delineate the actions and aspirations of the various local and supra-local actors involved, including the state, and show why resolution of the original conflict—involving the sale of a parcel of land by a group of men whose rights of ownership to it are dis-puted—remains elusive. My argument is that the conflicting interventions from state-sponsored institutions on various levels (from direct intervention by the army to an ap-parent upholding of the judicial power of newly "decentralized" local communities) have effectively created a legal vacuum, which leads local actors to seek recourse in moral rather than legal orders. As such, the case I present lends itself well for comparison with other instances of legal uncertainties and its sometimes productive, yet oftentimes also troubling consequences.
Janialy Ortiz (University of Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
Building upon results from an ongoing ethnography in Puerto Rico, I will discuss how a communitarian development project was received in a contested terrain of legal pluralism, forging what was opposed to the foreseen.
Paper long abstract:
A decade ago, the government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico purposely attempted to eradicate poverty while implementing an ambitious program called "Integral Development for the Special Communities" (2001). Concomitant with other development policies around the world, this program responded to an often-repeated claim: the necessity to promote community self-management, and to create both, a more participatory form of government and citizenship for conflict resolution. In order to accomplish such task, each Special Community had to plan, design and manage a significant infrastructural project, which not only will change their material wellbeing, but also increase their sense of social responsibility. Nonetheless, not every infrastructural proposal was received without conflict, even if the protagonists of these contested claims were also government agents.
Building upon results from an ongoing ethnography, I seek to discuss how residents from a poor neighborhood located in the San Juan Metropolitan Area, responded to what seems a paradoxical communitarian policy among an inherently contested terrain of legal pluralism. I will like to argue that despite the work of producing responsible subjects might despoliticizes citizens in their dealings of various issues, a public legal conflict between different braches of the state could force the citizens to speak about the possibilities of alternatives, or by the contrary, forge what was opposed to the foreseen: community segregation. Therefore, I aim to discuss how political-economic processes are simultaneously implicated, and yet elided, in social-interest housing development projects, and in these processes of producing orderly, empowered, responsible, development subjects.
Rano Turaeva (Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to investigate into the principles of reconstruction of certainty through formation of informal norms and rules in regulating economic activities outside of the state system.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims to investigate into the principles of reconstruction of certainty through formation of informal norms and rules in regulating economic activities outside of the state system. The collapse of the Soviet Empire has brought much of uncertainties which resulted from the break of the Soviet welfare system and employment market. These uncertainties led people to rethink their survival strategies and security has become number one concern in every day lives of ordinary people. “Even doctors went into streets”, I was told, which was described as tirikchilik. The paper will decipher the principles of ordering of the spaces within the realm of tirikchilik. These norms and forms of order are influenced by kinship, friendship and other relations as well as other regulating forces such as religious belief and gender roles including, for example, issues of status and familial and kinship responsibilities. These spaces of micro-orders are the alternative forms of normative ordering where normative rather than legal means of sanctioning applied. In these conditions of legal pluralism people found themselves in the situation of uncertainties about trust, authority and shared responsibilities outside the realm of state control.