The judge as tragic hero: Judicial ethics in Lebanon's shari'a courts

Abstract

In this article, I present ethnography of judicial practice in Lebanon's shari'a courts and find a tension between the identity of the judges presiding as Islamic religious specialists and their identity as legal professionals. Just applying the rules of the law is incompatible with true religious vocation, which demands personal engagement with the morally needy. But to ignore legal strictures is to be dismissed as a mere sermonizer. I find this case illustrative of a deeper tension between the use of rules and the disciplining of virtuous selves and argue for a new anthropology of rules to set alongside the new anthropology of ethics. [bureaucracy, ethics, Islam, law, Lebanon, rules, shari'a court]

Autism and the Proficiency of Social Ineptitude: Probing the Rules of “Appropriate” Behavior

“…Social anthropologists, such as Sidnell (), Kirke (), Clarke (), and Robbins () have demonstrated the means by which cultural particularities of value and meaning both shape and reflect the ways people understand and negotiate social rules. Yet like Desjarlais (), Edgerton (), and Martin (), among others, my own study engages with a different sort of particularity: not strictly cultural, but cognitive and neurological.…”

“…One minor aim is to explore the ways in which a focus on rules and rule following might add to the anthropological literature on autism (e.g., Bagatell 2007Bagatell , 2010Chamak 2008;Grinker 2007;Nadesan 2005;Ochs and Solomon 2010;Ortega 2009;Silverman 2012;Solomon 2010), as well as on other forms of cognitive divergence (e.g., Cohen 1998;Desjarlais 1999;Edgerton 1967;Lock 2013;Luhrmann 2007;Martin 2009;Warin 2000). A second, more central aim is to expand and refine the anthropological theorizing of rules and rule following as social practice (e.g., Bourdieu 2013;Clarke 2012;Faubion 2001;Garfinkel 1967;Kirke 2010;Lash 2002;Robbins 2010;Schauer 1991;Sidnell 2003;Wittgenstein 1953). This article will demonstrate that due to the want of an intuitive grasp for social etiquette, community members had gradually come to develop an alternative style of sociality.…”

On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology

“…If the precarious world is speaking to us in heightened ethical registers, anthropologists were further interested in its proliferating Christian charismatic religious forms. Although a number of articles focus on a variety of religious practices ranging from Islamic (Adely ; Clarke ; Henig ; Mittermaier ) to indigenized Catholic (Tassi ), Siberian Buddhist (Bernstein ; BuckQuijada 2012), and popular Hindu (Singh ), the biggest cluster focuses on evangelical Christianity both far (Chua ; Eriksen ) and near (in the United States and England; see Brahinsky ; Engelke ; Jones ; Luhrman ; McGovern ). Two articles in particular speak to some of the themes raised in this review.…”

Cultivating and Contesting Order: 'European Turks' and Negotiations of Neighbourliness at 'Home'

“…I show how return migrants' ethical projects bolster and challenge existing class, national and transnational relationships. Departing from previous work in the anthropology of the Middle East that has explored ethical projects in terms of religious piety (Clarke 2012;Mahmood 2005), here I focus on projects of domestication that are mobilised in the creation of middle-class and national subjectivities.…”