The Constitution of Violence Through the Language of Law: Legal Hermenutics in Second‐Century Roman Egypt

Bryen, Ari Z. 2013. Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation . Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 376. $75.00 cloth; $75.00 eBook. This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, calling on legal authorities to interpret claims of iniuria, or legal battery, into a language that they understand and remedy. In doing so, law changes the discourse of violence, specifically, and social life, more broadly.     

Pro- and anti-system behavior: a complementary approach to voice and silence in studies of political behavior

Theories of participation and non-participation are largely unable to capture and distinguish anti-system behavior, which ranges from deliberate silence to political violence. To better understand and measure these diverse forms of citizen participation, and to distinguish these from forms of alienation and marginalization, this article builds a new model of anti-system behavior in a way that facilitates the development of empirically observable variables and hypotheses. To do so, I draw upon sociological approaches to alienation – which examine intensities of rebellion and contestation – and combine them with the standard political scientific approach – which examines intensities of engagement based on resources. The problem, I argue, is that each approach only partially explains the motivations behind aberrant political behavior in modern democratic systems; they are in fact two sides of the same coin. I consider three cases of apparent silent citizenship: Muslims in Western Europe, Roma in Eastern Europe, and white working-class people in North America and Europe.     

Indigenous Australians: Language, and the Law

Indigenous peoples face a number of hurdles intaking cases to Australian law courts. In thecase that the social and economic problems canbe overcome, they face problems related to theintellectual structures of the court and thelanguage and philosophical beliefs that thecourt systems are based on. Derrida shows thatWestern metaphysics privileges speech overwriting, and this counts against indigenouscultures in which narrative knowledge is a formof writing. Due to this privileging, there is adifferend involving the courts and indigenouspeoples which makes the achievement of justicedifficult in the legal arena in Australia. Thisarticle questions whether the courts are thecorrect bodies to deal with indigenous issues.The achievement of justice is made moredifficult again by the truth-producing effectsof legal decisions, which render native titleas a weaker form of property right. Finally,indigenous Australians are caught in a catch-22situation, in which in order to receivejustice, they must Westernise their thought toadapt to the court system, and yet not allowany Westernisation of their culture. Such aWesternisation can be forced upon indigenouspeoples by the truth-producing effects oflanguage.