This article contributes to a growing literature on the implementation of shariʿa-derived state legislation in Egypt by exploring how differently positioned divorced mothers navigate Egypt’s highly gendered personal status codes under circumstances where many men are increasingly unable to discharge their part of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ due to a shortage in affordable housing. We highlight two discrepancies between legislative rules and social practice: The first is the divergence between state law and everyday norms, and the second looks at the limits of implementation and compliance in terms of actions taken by courts and other officials. We consider how and why Muslim personal status law reforms have sought to enhance divorced women’s bargaining position in the family where the relevant laws often have unintended, unforeseen and contradictory consequences when it comes to divorced custodian mothers’ access to housing.
{"title":"With the Best of Intentions","authors":"M. Hendawy, M. Lindbekk","doi":"10.3167/jla.2022.060104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2022.060104","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes to a growing literature on the implementation of shariʿa-derived state legislation in Egypt by exploring how differently positioned divorced mothers navigate Egypt’s highly gendered personal status codes under circumstances where many men are increasingly unable to discharge their part of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ due to a shortage in affordable housing. We highlight two discrepancies between legislative rules and social practice: The first is the divergence between state law and everyday norms, and the second looks at the limits of implementation and compliance in terms of actions taken by courts and other officials. We consider how and why Muslim personal status law reforms have sought to enhance divorced women’s bargaining position in the family where the relevant laws often have unintended, unforeseen and contradictory consequences when it comes to divorced custodian mothers’ access to housing.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82448302","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}
This commentary draws on personal experiences, my time spent discussing acts of harm in the academy with activists, and a review of various incidences on issues of academic harm and responsibility. Over the last few years, I have observed numerous high-profile cases in anthropology – in various countries and various contexts – that have elicited a significant public response. Some frame this kind of harm as the proverbial ‘few bad apples’, an approach I reject as it ignores what enables harm. Alternatively, some attempt to use the idea of ‘academic freedom’ as a way to sidestep questions of interpersonal obligations. Recently, I have encountered this line of argument in defences made by some against allegations about John Comaroff, such as media pieces that I note have been later cross-posted to his own website (Comaroff 2022; Walsh 2022). Instead of settling into a debate about what is or is not ‘academic freedom’, I here highlight a different reorientation, a shift in framing: what I have called, in conversations with friends and collaborators, ‘academic responsibility’. This reminds us that whereas academic freedom is frequently framed as a freedom to or a freedom from, academic responsibility emphasises our responsibilities as scholars and the obligations which follow to others. This includes a refusal of what Zoe Todd (2019) calls a ‘failure of imagination’ – we can and must envision different ways of building scholarly spaces beyond what we ourselves have seen or experienced in the academy.
{"title":"Addressing Serious Harm, Reconsidering Policy and Building Towards Repair","authors":"Rine Vieth","doi":"10.3167/jla.2022.060106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2022.060106","url":null,"abstract":"This commentary draws on personal experiences, my time spent discussing acts of harm in the academy with activists, and a review of various incidences on issues of academic harm and responsibility. Over the last few years, I have observed numerous high-profile cases in anthropology – in various countries and various contexts – that have elicited a significant public response. Some frame this kind of harm as the proverbial ‘few bad apples’, an approach I reject as it ignores what enables harm. Alternatively, some attempt to use the idea of ‘academic freedom’ as a way to sidestep questions of interpersonal obligations. Recently, I have encountered this line of argument in defences made by some against allegations about John Comaroff, such as media pieces that I note have been later cross-posted to his own website (Comaroff 2022; Walsh 2022). Instead of settling into a debate about what is or is not ‘academic freedom’, I here highlight a different reorientation, a shift in framing: what I have called, in conversations with friends and collaborators, ‘academic responsibility’. This reminds us that whereas academic freedom is frequently framed as a freedom to or a freedom from, academic responsibility emphasises our responsibilities as scholars and the obligations which follow to others. This includes a refusal of what Zoe Todd (2019) calls a ‘failure of imagination’ – we can and must envision different ways of building scholarly spaces beyond what we ourselves have seen or experienced in the academy.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87159760","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}
Located in Africa’s Sahel region, the Republic of Mali enjoyed various fruits of its transition to political pluralism and liberal economic restructuring from the 1990s to the early 2000s. When the Malian government sought to amend civil laws governing marriage and family life, and eliminate legal discrimination against women, however, it faced considerable political opposition. Islamic civil society groups capitalised on men’s heightened anxieties to claim a more assertive role in the national public sphere. Subsequent legal reforms constituted a clear political victory for political Islamism in the country and a corresponding setback for Western-backed women’s organisations. Tracing the evolution of Malian marriage and family law from the 1960s to the 2020s, this article argues that conflicting notions of what it means to protect women, coupled with the structural failings of Mali’s post-colonial state, have stymied efforts to ensure women’s rights within a secular, egalitarian legal framework.
{"title":"Left in the Cold","authors":"B. Whitehouse","doi":"10.3167/jla.2022.060105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2022.060105","url":null,"abstract":"Located in Africa’s Sahel region, the Republic of Mali enjoyed various fruits of its transition to political pluralism and liberal economic restructuring from the 1990s to the early 2000s. When the Malian government sought to amend civil laws governing marriage and family life, and eliminate legal discrimination against women, however, it faced considerable political opposition. Islamic civil society groups capitalised on men’s heightened anxieties to claim a more assertive role in the national public sphere. Subsequent legal reforms constituted a clear political victory for political Islamism in the country and a corresponding setback for Western-backed women’s organisations. Tracing the evolution of Malian marriage and family law from the 1960s to the 2020s, this article argues that conflicting notions of what it means to protect women, coupled with the structural failings of Mali’s post-colonial state, have stymied efforts to ensure women’s rights within a secular, egalitarian legal framework.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73134061","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}
The issue of harm in certain contexts and settings at some very fraught moments appears overly connected to anthropology: an idea of the discipline is made as the problem in a focus that can overshadow the actions of individuals and or institutional practices. This includes claims for anthropological harm that conflate the actions of particular individuals with the discipline. Alongside the potential harm in blaming anthropology, indiscriminately, a form of public anthropology may be gleaned: a mandate emerges to attend to spaces which presage this furore. The discipline is being ‘re-tasked’ robustly with its own huge remit to avoid damage in the studies of all peoples. This is extended to detrimental spaces that are revealed in academia, structural or evident, for which anthropology must be made to take culpability, particularly so in certain contemporary high-profile incidents.
{"title":"Do No Harm","authors":"Narmala Halstead","doi":"10.3167/jla.2022.060101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2022.060101","url":null,"abstract":"The issue of harm in certain contexts and settings at some very fraught moments appears overly connected to anthropology: an idea of the discipline is made as the problem in a focus that can overshadow the actions of individuals and or institutional practices. This includes claims for anthropological harm that conflate the actions of particular individuals with the discipline. Alongside the potential harm in blaming anthropology, indiscriminately, a form of public anthropology may be gleaned: a mandate emerges to attend to spaces which presage this furore. The discipline is being ‘re-tasked’ robustly with its own huge remit to avoid damage in the studies of all peoples. This is extended to detrimental spaces that are revealed in academia, structural or evident, for which anthropology must be made to take culpability, particularly so in certain contemporary high-profile incidents.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87797948","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}
Anindita Chakrabarti, K. C. Mujeebu Rahman, Suchandra Ghosh
In India, where religion-specific laws govern issues of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance, the family laws of Muslims – the largest religious minority – have been a thorny issue in the post-independence period. In recent years, the major intervention in Muslim personal law reform came in the form of the invalidation of instant divorce or triple talaq by the Supreme Court of India. Subsequently, a law was passed that criminalised it. By delving into a close examination of recent judicial activism and by drawing on our ethnographic work with Muslim women in India, we show that it is only by refocussing the debate from judicial discourse to legal practice that the trope of Muslim women’s victimhood and the tired debates about religious freedom versus citizenship rights can be questioned and bypassed.
{"title":"Of Marriage, Divorce and Criminalisation","authors":"Anindita Chakrabarti, K. C. Mujeebu Rahman, Suchandra Ghosh","doi":"10.3167/jla.2022.060103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2022.060103","url":null,"abstract":"In India, where religion-specific laws govern issues of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance, the family laws of Muslims – the largest religious minority – have been a thorny issue in the post-independence period. In recent years, the major intervention in Muslim personal law reform came in the form of the invalidation of instant divorce or triple talaq by the Supreme Court of India. Subsequently, a law was passed that criminalised it. By delving into a close examination of recent judicial activism and by drawing on our ethnographic work with Muslim women in India, we show that it is only by refocussing the debate from judicial discourse to legal practice that the trope of Muslim women’s victimhood and the tired debates about religious freedom versus citizenship rights can be questioned and bypassed.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84520863","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}
Werbner, Richard. (2020), Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations(Manchester: Manchester University Press).
{"title":"Gluckman’s Legacy","authors":"Isak Niehaus","doi":"10.3167/jla.2021.050205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2021.050205","url":null,"abstract":"Werbner, Richard. (2020), Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations(Manchester: Manchester University Press).","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75402682","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}
This article addresses different approaches to the spate of home repossessions experienced in Spain after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. It considers the diverging ways in which various involved actors – legislators setting regulatory frameworks, debt advisors from governmental and non-governmental agencies, judges ruling on repossession procedures, anti-repossession movements advocating debt refusal and the ‘self-defence’ of the right to housing – have reacted to the housing crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork developed in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the article considers that a vindicatory approach, one that incorporates moral ideas of justice, informed some of these diverging reactions over and against the orthodox stance that the obligation to repay is absolute. The vindicatory understanding of justice advocates favouring debtors by taking into account their new circumstances and repairing the social harm inflicted on them.
{"title":"Limiting Mortgagors’ Liability and Questioning the Obligation to Repay","authors":"Irene Sabaté Muriel","doi":"10.3167/jla.2021.050203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2021.050203","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses different approaches to the spate of home repossessions experienced in Spain after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. It considers the diverging ways in which various involved actors – legislators setting regulatory frameworks, debt advisors from governmental and non-governmental agencies, judges ruling on repossession procedures, anti-repossession movements advocating debt refusal and the ‘self-defence’ of the right to housing – have reacted to the housing crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork developed in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the article considers that a vindicatory approach, one that incorporates moral ideas of justice, informed some of these diverging reactions over and against the orthodox stance that the obligation to repay is absolute. The vindicatory understanding of justice advocates favouring debtors by taking into account their new circumstances and repairing the social harm inflicted on them.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83699336","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}
This article argues that how sex appears in the law shapes what erotic pleasure is in a commercial context, and indirectly produces sex workers’ ideas about the moral stakes of engaging in certain acts. Although Japan’s anti-prostitution law was intended to eliminate commercial sex, the state’s mid-century attempt to define a proscribed site of sexual pleasure centered on intercourse instead led to the proliferation of erotic services in a diversified marketplace. The efforts of cisheteronormative sex industry businesses to navigate the actual conditions of the law’s enforcement have in turn made intercourse a distinctive site of concern for many sex workers, who regard it as the basis of an imagined moral hierarchy within the industry and as representing the inability of their workplaces to protect them.
{"title":"Twenty-Four Ways to Have Sex within the Law","authors":"G. Koch","doi":"10.3167/jla.2021.050202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2021.050202","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that how sex appears in the law shapes what erotic pleasure is in a commercial context, and indirectly produces sex workers’ ideas about the moral stakes of engaging in certain acts. Although Japan’s anti-prostitution law was intended to eliminate commercial sex, the state’s mid-century attempt to define a proscribed site of sexual pleasure centered on intercourse instead led to the proliferation of erotic services in a diversified marketplace. The efforts of cisheteronormative sex industry businesses to navigate the actual conditions of the law’s enforcement have in turn made intercourse a distinctive site of concern for many sex workers, who regard it as the basis of an imagined moral hierarchy within the industry and as representing the inability of their workplaces to protect them.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81922658","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}
We explore judges’ approaches to asylum court appeals based on the issue of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Our court ethnography in Germany and Austria in 2018 and 2019 provides an insight into how such claims are discussed during appeals. At the time, they were increasingly common, especially concerning Iranians and Afghans involved in ‘free churches’ (e.g. Evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic). We show how rumours, congregations’ reputations and assumptions about baptism and what genuine conversions entail are discussed. These factors can not only influence appellants’ cases, but reveal church–state tensions and some of the intractable challenges of refugee status determination.
{"title":"‘Assembly-Line Baptism’","authors":"Nicole Hoellerer, Nick Gill","doi":"10.3167/jla.2021.050201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2021.050201","url":null,"abstract":"We explore judges’ approaches to asylum court appeals based on the issue of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Our court ethnography in Germany and Austria in 2018 and 2019 provides an insight into how such claims are discussed during appeals. At the time, they were increasingly common, especially concerning Iranians and Afghans involved in ‘free churches’ (e.g. Evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic). We show how rumours, congregations’ reputations and assumptions about baptism and what genuine conversions entail are discussed. These factors can not only influence appellants’ cases, but reveal church–state tensions and some of the intractable challenges of refugee status determination.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82908185","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}
What kind of phenomenon is it when ordinary people in the United Kingdom unexpectedly abide by government advice on social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even anticipating constraints on their activities? These happenings demand that we engage anthropologically with compliance – acts or activities that conform, submit or adapt to rules or to the demands of others. At present, there is no ‘anthropology of compliance’. Rather, the discipline has inherited traditions of thought about compliance – as a necessary aspect of sociability or a morally suspect complicity, demanding resistance. These assumptions remain unexamined, but profoundly shape anthropological scholarship. This introduction aims to show how and why compliance might be a useful heuristic for anthropology. We define compliance as that set of means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others in their collective life. We argue that this conception of compliance allows us to multiply the kinds of phenomena we can call ‘political’. It allows us to think about the political constitution of ‘radical’ difference, but to avoid making people identical with their cultural or conceptual worlds. By showing what compliance is and how it operates in and on social life, we ought therefore to be able to recover both specific forms of suffering and inequality and the ways in which social lives are constitutively different.
{"title":"Compliance","authors":"W. Rollason, Eric Hirsch","doi":"10.3167/jla.2021.050101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2021.050101","url":null,"abstract":"What kind of phenomenon is it when ordinary people in the United Kingdom unexpectedly abide by government advice on social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even anticipating constraints on their activities? These happenings demand that we engage anthropologically with compliance – acts or activities that conform, submit or adapt to rules or to the demands of others. At present, there is no ‘anthropology of compliance’. Rather, the discipline has inherited traditions of thought about compliance – as a necessary aspect of sociability or a morally suspect complicity, demanding resistance. These assumptions remain unexamined, but profoundly shape anthropological scholarship. This introduction aims to show how and why compliance might be a useful heuristic for anthropology. We define compliance as that set of means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others in their collective life. We argue that this conception of compliance allows us to multiply the kinds of phenomena we can call ‘political’. It allows us to think about the political constitution of ‘radical’ difference, but to avoid making people identical with their cultural or conceptual worlds. By showing what compliance is and how it operates in and on social life, we ought therefore to be able to recover both specific forms of suffering and inequality and the ways in which social lives are constitutively different.","PeriodicalId":34676,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Legal Anthropology","volume":"2016 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86626411","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}
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