Yazid Ben Hounet - Truth, Intentionality and Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to Crime

This book provides an anthropological exploration of the ways in which crime is perceived and defined, focusing on notions of truth, intentionality and evidence. The chapters contain rich ethnographic case studies drawn from work in the Middle East, Africa, India, Mexico and Europe. A variety of instances are discussed, from court proceedings, police reports and newspapers to moments of conflict resolution and reconciliation. Through analysis of this material, the authors reflect on how perception of an act as a crime can differ and how the definition of crime may not be shared by all societies. The approach takes into consideration local standards as well as social, legal and contextual constraints.

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35Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities

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36Meeting Ethnography

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38On Knowing Humanity

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39Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal

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40Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South

The Human Consequences of Piracy in China and Brazil

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado

41Truth, Intentionality and Evidence

Anthropological Approaches to Crime

Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den

Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den

First published 2017

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2017 selection and editorial matter, Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-64609-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-62774-8 (ebk)

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This book comes out of a January 2015 workshop held at the Centre Jacques Berque (Rabat), with the support of the Wenner Gren Foundation and of the Laboratoire dAnthropologie Sociale (Paris).

In the introduction to the volume Law at Work (Dupret et al., 2015), four major themes are identified which help clarify the specific contributions of praxiology to the study of law. The first theme concerns the relationship between law in action and law on the books. Law as a social phenomenon cannot be reduced to legal codes (law on the books). However, it would be mistaken to ignore how formal statutes, case law and rules of evidence are integral to the practice of law. The Platonist idea that formally codified laws are mere appearances, and that the social scientists task is to uncover the reality lying behind such appearances, confounds analysis because it fails to take into account how formal law is taken up in practice. If we were to oppose theory to practice and legal provisions to living law, we would fail to understand fully the practical uses of law. A more adequate understanding can be gained through the close description of both professionals and laypersons orientations to, and reifications of, legal categories as they emerge from actual encounters in legal forums in the context of practical casework.

The second theme is related to the fact that in most sociolegal studies, scholars address the nature of law but ignore or presuppose the phenomenon of legal practice itself. The synthetic theories they deploy fail to resolve the production of legal practice. This has been called the missing what of sociolegal studies. This failure is not an omission so much as a concomitant of a pursuit of general models and assessments that aim to comprehend the fundamental significance of the law and to compare and critically examine legal institutions. As a result, they make little or no attempt to investigate the specific competencies through which lawyers collaboratively produce and coordinate legal actions in particular circumstances. It means that sociologists tend to describe various social influences on and implications of the growth and development of legal institutions while taking for granted that lawyers write briefs, present cases, interrogate witnesses, and engage in legal reasoning (Lynch, 1993, 114). Often, social science research devotes no attention to the here and now dimension of activity, and by so doing it obscures the necessarily situated character of such activity. To paraphrase Michael Moerman (1974: 68), sociolegal studies would do better to describe and analyze how legal categories are used rather than treating them as self-evident prescriptions and proscriptions for action.