No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
“Moral Injury” and “Offended Feelings”: Translation of Religious Emotionality into the Language of Court Documents
Abstract
The article presents the results of the study of discursive construction and moralization of subjectivity in court documents. The research is based on the analysis of court decisions in criminal cases under Article 148 of the Criminal Code, Part 1 and Part 2 (better known as the article ‘on insulting the feelings of believers’), as well as demanding compensation for moral injury for ‘insulting the feelings of believers’ under Article 151 of the Civil Code. The documents create a model of an intersubjective situation of insult, considered with the reliance on the internal states of the participants of this situation — intentions in the case of the accused and emotions in the case of the victims, which are expressed through the legal language. The discursive reconstruction of the intentions of the accused is framed with reference to legal moral categories, this creates an image of a person who consistently and deliberately violates the norms of the moral order. To protect this order, ‘religious feelings’ translated into terms of moral injury and moral suffering. Hence, in the context of the legal protection of the ‘feelings of believers’, the anti‑social behaviour of the accused is contrasted with social, i.e. moral, behaviour, namely, respect for certain (most often Orthodox Christian) symbols. The typical antipode for the accused is a religious person, or, rather, someone who properly demonstrates an emotional reaction to acts of transgression of moral boundaries.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Modern law seems to be designed to keep emotions at bay. The Sentimental Court argues the exact opposite: that the law is not designed to cast out affective dynamics, but to create them. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork - both during the trial of former Lord's Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Netherlands and in rural northern Uganda at the scenes of violence - this book is an in-depth investigation of the affective life of legalized transitional justice interventions in Africa. Jonas Bens argues that the law purposefully creates, mobilizes, shapes, and transforms atmospheres and sentiments, and further discusses how we should think about the future of law and justice in our colonial present by focusing on the politics of atmosphere and sentiment in which they are entangled.
This article analyses the configurations of belief, critique, and religious freedom in Russia since the performance of the Russian group Pussy Riot in 2012. The ‘punk prayer’ and its legal and political aftermath are interpreted as an incidence of the contestation of the boundary between the secular and the religious in the Russian legal and social sphere. The authors show that the outcome of this contestation has had a decisive impact on the way in which religion, critique, and the human right of religious freedom have been defined in the present Russian context. In response to Pussy Riot, the Russian legislator turned offending religious feelings into a crime. The article investigates two more recent cases where offended feelings of believers were involved, the opera “Tannhäuser” in Ekaterinburg in 2015 and the movie Matilda in 2017, and analyses how the initial power-conforming configuration that emerged as a reply to the ‘punk prayer’ has revealed a ‘power-disturbing’ potential as conservative Orthodox groups have started to challenge the authority of the State and the Church leadership. The article is based on primary sources from Russian debates surrounding Pussy Riot, Matilda, and “Tannhäuser” and on theoretical literature on the religious–secular boundary and human rights.
This article examines the explosive reaction to ‘Punk Prayer’ as a religious act. It argues that the power of the performance as iconoclash resulted from the fact that it tapped, resonated with and disturbed Russia’s Orthodox culture through its appropriation of Orthodox sound, space and symbols – namely, the image of Mary, the Mother of God. The perceived position of its performers as insiders or outsiders to Orthodoxy, the evaluation of the sincerity of Punk Prayer as prayer and the paradoxical role that gender played in shaping these perceptions contributed to the tumultuous response.
This book with contributions by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, seeks to offer an examination of topical issues relating to freedom of expression, censorship, and blasphemy in contemporary multicultural democracies. With a foreword by Flemming Rose. © Paul Cliteur and Tom Herrenberg/Leiden University Press, 2016. All rights reserved.
This article examines the explosive reaction to ‘Punk Prayer’ as a religious act. It argues that the power of the performance as iconoclash resulted from the fact that it tapped, resonated with, and disturbed Russia’s Orthodox culture through its appropriation of Orthodox sound, space, and symbols – namely, the image of Mary, the Mother of God. The perceived position of its performers as insiders or outsiders to Orthodoxy, the evaluation of the sincerity of Punk Prayer as prayer, and the paradoxical role that gender played in shaping these perceptions contributed to the tumultuous response.
The creation of class subjectivities is an important but understudied topic for social memory studies, particularly in former socialist contexts. Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory by deploying the categories of “intelligentsia” and “worker” as reified, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In this article, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians’ sense of themselves as long-standing victims of class-based dispossession. Ethnographically, I examine debates I had with Russian friends about Mikhail Bulgakov's popular novel, Heart of a Dog, which depicts the Bolsheviks’ establishment of power in the 1920s through the eyes of an elite physician–scientist. Exploring Russians’ reactions to this story and their sense of its broader relevance reveals how aspiring middle-class subjects embraced a narrative of the Soviet past to justify the emerging inequalities of market reforms. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate a politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratified consumption. [memory, class, stratified consumption, health care, postsocialism, Russia]
In an inaugural lecture for a chair of ethnicity and conflict in comparative perspective it is probably a timely question to ask how media influence ethnic and religious belonging, the formation of ethnic and religious networks and communities, and how more generally, uses of media technology shape the relationships between people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Do media not profoundly shape our impressions of the ethnic and religious other? After all, trends of intensified globalization in the last three decades appear to have brought about a global media-sustained imaginary in which such representations are produced and circulated.And can media not also appear as fearful agents of separation, purism, and ethnic and religious antagonism, as most chillingly exemplified in the radio broadcasts in 1994 that called on Rwandans to engage in genocidal murder of their neighbors?
The article deals with the moral implications of the practice of public apologies, based on the case of modern Dagestan. Unlike most studies in linguistics and political science, in this article, we are interested not in the structure of official apologies as speech acts and the conditions of achieving their communicative effect, but rather in the variability of pictures of the moral order that may stand behind the need for public apologies in a particular cultural context, and the type of moral subject that can be constructed through such public acts. The material for the analysis included the public apologies that are relevant within Dagestani society, the apologies by Dagestani people living outside the republic, and the cases of apologies to Dagestanis themselves. The article demonstrates how the spread of the practice of public apologies has problematized the boundaries of collective responsibility in Dagestani society, the notions of the subject, its qualities and agency associated with the institution of reputation, as well as the possibility of subordination and resistance to the social structure.
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the ‘original political society’ as a society where supposedly ‘egalitarian’ relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is ‘a state’, but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political states: systematic means to make populations legible and coercive means to identity the intentions of others. The nascent forms of state legibility and public mind reading that are present in Sahlins’s original political society are not unified and tied to particular agents. A discussion of the limitations of state and mind legibility points to the fundamental correlations between those two forms of legibility and their co-implication in whatever might be called ‘the state’.
Urban space is a familiar place of religious-secular struggles in postsocialist world today, foremost due to the deprivatization of religion followed by attempts of religious organizations and new non-secular publics to find an acceptable public space in the post-secular world. At the same time, secular publics tend to be highly sensitive to interventions of religious ‘Others’ into the public sphere. In some cases, these struggles between secular and non-secular publics resemble ‘right to the city’ movements, when secularist activists claim the city as a space where presence of religion should be limited, separated and controlled by secular onlookers. The essay introduces the notion of ‘passionate secularism’ in order to stress the centrality of the passions, understood as sincere movements of the heart, in the rhetoric of the secularists which help them to articulate their high cultural status and moral superiority. It analyses a controversial 2016 proposal by authorities in St. Petersburg, Russia to transfer ownership of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a powerful symbol of local identity and a sort of an urban sacred place, from state to church and the protests unfolded in Winter and Spring 2017. They essay focuses on the ways how participants in the urban struggle historicized the lines and borders which were seen to divide inhabitants of the city as political or cultural descendants of the creators of the Soviet state, and discusses various historical loops they experience – as traps, burden or heritage.
The article is a study of anti-parasite legislation in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, with special reference to the Russian law of 4 May, 1961. Beginning with a brief historical survey of Soviet legislation against social marginals, it explores the complex four-year process of drafting the law against parasitism, particularly the work of the Polianskii commission, and shows how the traditional categories of beggar and tramp gave way to a broader understanding of social "parasites" as people who did not do "socially-useful work." In practice, this often meant people who, regardless of whether they formally held a regular job, earned their living in the "second economy." The law's spotty implementation is discussed, and local reports are used to show the range of targets of accusation, which came to include idle, Westernizing youth, religious sectarians, and even housewives.
Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the "postmodern turn" of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream "left" political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call "vulgar Foucauldianism," while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.
Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how this linkage operates via production formats, participant structures, genre conventions, and ideologies of personhood. We then consider approaches to citation in the domain of legal discourse, an arena that relies on specific, patterned forms of citation that are historically rooted, institutionally perpetuated, and subjectively reenacted.
The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations. In the hands of social theorists, such simplified schemas can be sources of insight; when enforced through structures of coercion, they tend to have precisely the opposite effect.
This article studies the affects retained, carried, and effected by documents, as they are produced, exchanged, transformed, and transacted among their users. I study the interactions which Turkish-Cypriots (in Britain and on either side of the border in Cyprus) forge with documents, especially those used for identity verification and travel. For those who juggle documents manufactured by several complexes of law and statecraft (including the `illegal' Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), documents generate differential and politically charged affectivities. Bringing anthropological literature on law, policy, and bureaucracy, as well as Actor Network Theory, into dialogue with psychoanalytic work on affect, this article charts a new terrain for the study of affect (in the domain of documents as objects) and explores emotive dimensions previously unattended by scholars of bureaucracy.
This article develops a trenchant critique of the rise of human rights as the main universal standard against which to judge violence and suffering. It begins with a case study of an act of mass atrocity in Surinam that was brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and which demonstrates the ways in which rights-based conceptions of justice distort our understandings of suffering and pare down social and moral narratives. Legal language instrumentalizes, cutting out the symbolic and expressive dimensions of violence. Anthropology is opposed to this methodological individualist and positivist approach to representation as it seeks to understand people's life worlds experientially. In contrast, the article asserts that violence is always a social fact, which can be apprehended through inter-subjectivity and dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. Conversation, understood in this manner, can provide an alternative to the `epistemological dictatorship' of a censorious rights-based regime of truth, and also of an anthropological discourse based in `culture'.
The remarkable coherence of this collection of papers may be due to their shared footing in Melanesia. But we should also take seriously Alan Rumsey's suggestion that we not think of these issues as being peculiarly Melanesian, and use them to help us think comparatively across cases. I want to offer some suggestions about how opacity claims, which can seem to be so specific to a certain ethnographic region, can help illuminate problems of mind and speech elsewhere. This means both entering into the specificity of the Melanesian examples to see what people might be up to when they talk this way, and drawing from our ethnographic insights those themes that turn up in all sorts of other places, including the Euro-American West. Certainly Melanesia is a locus classicus for opacity statements, which we might summarize as the claim that it is impossible to know what is in the mind of another person. But how "other" is the opacity claim, as we can call such statements about "other minds"? Perhaps both less and more than might at first seem to be the case.
The opacity claim, that it is impossible to know what is in the mind of another person, has commonly been treated as an assertion about psychology. But these papers make it very clear that it is perhaps not about psychology at all, or at least that it is also about a great deal more than that. Whatever else the opacity claim may be, it is surely a metalinguistic claim about the relations between public evidence and private states. More specifically, as both Alan Rumsey and Bambi Schieffelin point out, it is a metapragmatic claim. That is to say, it is a claim about acts of revealing and acts of concealing and how those are or are not to be taken as evidence for private states. And finally, as Rupert Stasch shows us, it can be a political claim. Returning now to the question of psychology, I would also like to argue that the opacity claim is part of a politics that is saturated with a moral psychology. I think Stasch's invocation of Richard Moran's (2001) work is very much to the point here. The opacity claim, at least in much of the Melanesian evidence we have before us in this collection, is among other things, a political claim about the moral and practical conditions of social interaction and about the power relations that those involve. It takes as one of its central concerns the question "what I am able to do with you, to do to you, and to keep from you?"
Joel Robbins starts off by suggesting that Melanesia offers a test of the limits of variability. Can people really operate without the kind of theory of other minds that seems to go along with imputing intentionality as a way of talking about the meaning of other people's words? In a strong sense Robbins seems to be suggesting that the imputing of intentions to others is in fact peculiar to us, the Euro-Americans, that it's just one of those funny things that Westerners believe. Here we have an instance of a classic topos in the reading of the more exotic ethnographies, in which we are invited to conclude that they, the "Others," actually understand the way social life (or, say language, or power, and so forth) really is, and thus give the lie to our own delusions in the West. But in the final instance these papers do not undertake the kind of frontal assault on Western psychology that such an argument seems to call for. Robbins essentially proposes this position and then in the end pulls back from it. And I think none of the papers in fact does make a direct challenge to familiar Western psychological claims. Indeed, both Alan Rumsey and Bambi Schieffelin make clear they find it hard to disagree with the basic observation of developmental psychologists (e.g. Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997) that a child's ability to lie, to play, and to take on roles ultimately seems to depend on a theory of other minds (a point whose implications for the theory of...
In this paper, I take seriously informed consent's material form: the paper form. I pursue two objectives: I first tackle different meanings that have been attributed to the fabrication of document forms themselves, and demonstrate how this fabrication process forces us to rethink the category of consent and, further, that of personhood. Second, I examine the consenting person as a new ethnographic subject and show how her submission to consent forms, in the context of hospital bureaucracies, enacts new forms of agency. Given the fact that patients and research subjects generally do not read consent documents, I conclude by offering the illegible consent form, rather than the meticulously designed consent form, as the exemplary artifact of hospital bureaucracies.
This article examines the role of identity documents in producing the particular texture of relationships between persons and states in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many people in the region the forms of legal identification they hold are central to their life chances. Considerable efforts are therefore made in trying to accumulate and manipulate documents for political and economic advantage. However, the implications of holding identity documents are always partial and unstable. This article argues that identity documents penetrate into the lives of those who hold them, not as reifying abstractions, but as an unpredictable and unstable technique of governance, producing fear and uncertainty for all those subject to their use. Although the production of identity documents creates a separation between the legal and the physical person, these two aspects of personhood are recombined as, through their anxieties, people come to embody the indeterminacies of the documents that they hold. In this way documents produce legibility and illegibility, stability and instability, coherence and incoherence.
In 1998, Italy passed a law (Article 18) granting “victims of human trafficking” temporary residence permits to “escape from situations of violence and abuse.” There were two conditions: the applicant had to agree to pursue criminal action against her exploiter and to participate in a state-funded “rehabilitation” program mostly offered by Catholic groups engaged in combating criminality and foreign prostitution as a form of “modern slavery.” Linking prostitution to female migration and slavery has significant implications for how migrant women are interpellated within the receiving country. When characterized as victims, these women are figured as lacking the dual capacities of desiring migration and appropriating laws that grant legal recognition. This article explores both the willed and imposed multiplicity of subject positions of these women within the fields of charitable and institutional languages. In Italy, qualifying as a “political refugee” or as a “victim of human trafficking” is often the only means of achieving the legal rights necessary to avoid repatriation. [translation, citizenship, migration, subjectivity, ethnopsychiatry, Italy, anthropology of institutions]
This paper examines how a number of pious and non-practising Belgian Maghrebi women who do not shake hands with the opposite sex and do not fast manage the sensitivity and transgressive potential of these practices. Whereas all interlocutors were prone to adjust their conducts to avoid controversies, these adaptations were nevertheless assessed differently. Adopting a flexible stand in the case of not-handshaking was viewed as normal by the pious women, while the impossibility of eating in front of other Muslims was problematised by the non-practising women. I suggest that these different assessments display the unequal ethical importance attributed to conducts in a liberal-secular regime.
This article explores the challenges that emerge at the intersection of economies of compassion and terror: local, national, and international forms of humanitarian assistance; security practices in insecure social and institutional environments; questions of victimization and global reparations; and quests for justice, as revealed through an analysis of political violence and humanitarian interventions in Haiti during and after the 1991-94 coup period. Each domain is constrained by politics and history but can engender "occult economies" that challenge the intended consequences of restitution policies at international, national, and local levels of exchange. 'Trauma' and discourses about traumatic suffering are the hinge around which these economies pivot, generating new forms of political subjectivity for Haitian activists.
Prestupleniya kak vozmushchenie kollektivnykh chuvstv: kontseptsiya E. Dyurkgeima i Aktual'nye art-praktiki // Filosofiya prava
- A M Razogreeva
Dostoinstvo lichnosti kak lichnaya sobstvennost': Metamorfoza rossiiskikh zakonov o porochashchikh svedeniyakh // Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
- K Cherkaeva
Problema ponyatnosti yuridicheskikh dokumentov v kontekste professional'noi identichnosti // Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. 2023. № 489
- E A Rudneva
- E V Troshchenkova
): yuridicheskaya teoriya i sotsial'naya praktika // Antropologicheskii forum
- T V Lastovka
- Tuneyadstvo V Sssr
«Tryasuny»: distsiplinarnoe obshchestvo, politicheskaya politsiya i sud
- A A Panchenko
Traektoriya ugolovnogo dela: institutsional'nyi analiz. SPb.: Izdatel'stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge
- E Paneyakh
- K Titaev
- M Shklyaruk
Yazykom protokola»: issledovanie svyazi yuridicheskogo yazyka s professional'noi povsednevnost'yu i organizatsionnym kontekstom // Sotsiologiya vlasti
- K D Titaev
- M S Shklyaruk
Documents and Bureaucracy
- M Hull
Hull, M. (2012) "Documents and Bureaucracy", Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 251-267.
2021) Freedom of Expression in Islam: Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws
- M K Masud
- K Vogt
- L Larsen
Masud, M. K., Vogt, K., Larsen, L., Moe, C. (eds.) (2021) Freedom of Expression in Islam:
Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws. London, New York, Dublin:
I. B. TAURIS.
Тунеядство в СССР (1961-1991): юридическая теория и социальная практика // Антропологический форум
- Т В Ластовка
Ластовка Т. В. Тунеядство в СССР (1961-1991): юридическая теория и социальная
практика // Антропологический форум. 2011. № 14. С. 212-229.
Траектория уголовного дела: институциональный анализ
- Э Панеях
- К Титаев
- М Шклярук
Панеях Э., Титаев К., Шклярук М. Траектория уголовного дела: институциональный
анализ. СПб.: Издательство Европейского университета в Санкт-Петербурге,
2018.
Преступления как возмущение коллективных чувств: концепция Э. Дюркгейма и Актуальные арт-практики // Философия права
- А М Разогреева
Разогреева А. М. Преступления как возмущение коллективных чувств: концепция
Э. Дюркгейма и Актуальные арт-практики // Философия права. 2017. № 4(83).
Проблема понятности юридических документов в контексте профессиональной идентичности // Вестник Томского государственного университета. 2023. № 489
- Е А Руднева
- Е В Трощенкова
Руднева Е. А., Трощенкова Е. В. Проблема понятности юридических документов в контексте профессиональной идентичности // Вестник Томского государственного университета. 2023. № 489. С. 25-35.
Языком протокола»: исследование связи юридического языка с профессиональной повседневностью и организационным контекстом // Социология власти
- К Д Титаев
- М С Шклярук
Титаев К. Д., Шклярук М. С. «Языком протокола»: исследование связи юридического языка с профессиональной повседневностью и организационным контекстом // Социология власти. 2015. № 27(2). С. 168-206.
Дело «Пусси райот» и особенности российского постсекуляризма // Государство, религия, церковь в России и за рубежом
- Д Узланер
Узланер Д. Дело «Пусси райот» и особенности российского постсекуляризма // Государство, религия, церковь в России и за рубежом. 2013. № 2(31). С. 93-133.
Достоинство личности как личная собственность: Метаморфоза российских законов о порочащих сведениях // Новое литературное обозрение
- К Черкаева
Черкаева К. Достоинство личности как личная собственность: Метаморфоза российских законов о порочащих сведениях // Новое литературное обозрение. 2018.
№ 3. С. 65-80.