Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
Making sense of the problems which illiterate people face in gaining access to justice puts the foundations of both the ethnography of law and the modern justice system itself into question. The essay explores this thesis with reference to the case of an elderly dairy farmer whose arrest for the mercy killing of his ailing brother attracted intense local and national attention. Documents from the trial which deal with the construction and use of evidence, confession, and testimony, along with schematic representations of the personal, community, and media responses to the case as depicted in the award-winning documentary Brother's Keeper (1992), render visible the textual conventions of a litigious society along with its non-literate and even ritual cultural context. The most troubling issue raised by the case involves a crisis in the bureaucratic organization and expert professionalization of modern litigation when it attempts to address the rights and competencies of relatively illiterate people who appear unable to articulate the values and beliefs of any cultural community at all.
Comprendre les problèmes qu' éprouvent les personnes illettrées ayant recours à la justice met en jeu les fondements de l'ethnographie du droit et ceux du système judiciaire moderne lui-même. L'auteur analyse cette question a la lumiere du procès d' un vieux fermier accusé de meurtre pour avoir euthanasié son frère souffrant, procès qui a captivé sa communauté et la nation américaine tout entière. Les documents du procès traitant de l'interprétation de la preuve, des aveux et des témoignages, ainsi que les représentations schématiques des réactions des personnes impliquées, de la communauté et des médias telles que dépeintes dans le documentaire primé, Brother's Keeper (1992), mettent en évidence les conventions textuelles auxquelles recourt une société procédurière et la réalité culturelle d'une société non instruite et ritualiste. Le problème le plus épineux que soulève cette affaire constitue l'impuissance respective de la bureaucratie et des experts de profession—émanations du procès moderne—de défendre les droits et d'évaluer la capacité pénale de personnes illettrées en apparence incapables d'exprimer les valeurs et les croyances de quelque groupe culturel que ce soit.
1. “What Tempers the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States” in Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969) at 270Google Scholar.
2. Garner, Bryan, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (London: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
3. Ibid.
4. See O'Neill, John, “Televideo Ergo Sum: Some Hypotheses on the Specular Functions of the Media” in his Plato's Cave: Desire, Power, and the Specular Functions of the Media (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1991)Google Scholar.
5. See Geertz, Clifford, “Slide Show: Evans Pritchard's African Transparencies” in his Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Writer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
6. Evans-Pritchard, , quoted in Douglas, Mary, Evans-Pritchard (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980) at 123Google Scholar.
7. Ibid. at 49–61.
8. Connie Chung, on CBS's “Face to Face,” as presented in Berlinger, Joe & Sinofsky, Bruce, Brother's Keeper (New York: Hand to Mouth International, 1992)Google Scholar. [Hereinafter BK].
9. Dayan, Daniel & Katz, Elihu, “Articulating Consensus: The Ritual and Rhetoric of Media Events” in Alexander, Jeffrey C., ed., Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
25. Garfinkel, Harold, “Some Rules of Correct Decisions that Jurors Make” in his Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967) 111Google Scholar.
26. Accordingly, the court did not automatically assume payment of fees for a lawyer it did not itself appoint; see The People of the State of New York v. Adelbert Ward, a.k.a. Delbert Ward 605 N.Y.S.2d 152 (Westlaw), Ralph A. Cognetti, Appellant (County of Madison, 9 December 1993).
27. Both excerpts transcribed from BK, supra note 8.
28. Ibid.
29. Malinowski, Bronislaw, “The Foundations of Faith and Morals” in Sex, Culture, and Myth (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963) 303Google Scholar.
30. Ibid. See Clifford Geertz, “I-Witnessing: Malinowski's Children,” in Geertz, supra note 5.
31. Genesis 4: 8,9, as quoted in the epigraph to BK, supra note 8.
32. Greenhouse, Carol J., Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
33. Geertz, Clifford, “Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983) 232Google Scholar.
34. Hibbits, Bernard J., “Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse” (1994) 16:2Cordozo Law Review 220Google Scholar.
35. See Habermas, Jürgen, “The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action” in his The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) 86Google Scholar.
36. See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Random House, 1978) at 31.Google Scholar
