LAW AND SOCIETY SCHOLARSHIP AFTER THE TURN TO CULTURE AND AWAY FROM THE STATE
AMY J. COHEN

Review of

Laws and societies in global contexts: contemporary approaches BY EVE DARIAN-SMITH
– See more at: http://aotcpress.com/articles/law-society-scholarship-turn-culture-state/#sthash.JNyUdU2q.dpuf

I just stumbled across it. Seems relevant to the questions with which we struggle.

First, a little background. I am neither Canadian nor First Nations. I am a U.S. citizen who has lived and worked in Japan for nearly thirty-five years. Based on statistics for 2011 cited in Wikipedia I am one of just under 50,000 U.S. citizens who make up only 2.4% of the foreigners living in Japan, most of whom are Chinese or Korean. Anthropology is my hobby, not the way I make my living.

When I think about my own mixed, most Scots-Irish-German ancestors and the national mythology and world history I was taught growing up in southeast Virginia in the 1950s and 60s, I think about people who were indigenous somewhere else and chose to emigrate to what they dreamed was a New World, where they could recreate themselves freed from the traditions in which they were raised. As an anthropologist I know that the continent to which they migrated was already populated. I can only imagine the pain and humiliation of those who survived the resulting wars on the losing side. How to ease that pain and demonstrate respect are, to me, important issues. Are they more important than the polarization of income between the 1% and the 99%? Or the likely impact of global warming or artificial intelligence on the lives of my grandchildren? Should the rights of “nations” take precedence over these issues?

As a political activist whose politics have been shaped by the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, my aims are to minimize suffering and, as far as possible, ensure equal opportunity for every human child. I am aware that, as Rorty argues, national pride, coupled with a sense of shame when the nation with which one identifies does evil things, is essential for effective political action. The alternative is political apathy and a future in which things fall apart. At the same time, I am deeply uneasy about romantic concepts of nationhood, in which blood, soil and language not only exclude “the others” but also become traps for individuals who might wish to live different lives. The bloodiest and most intractable conflicts on earth are rooted in these concepts. So I have some questions for you.

How do you feel about African immigrants dying at sea in desperate, illegal efforts to reach Europe? Or would-be immigrants from South or Southeast Asia to Australia confined to what are, in effect, concentration camps on Nauru? What about Israel and Palestine? The aspirations of Kurds or Chechens? Or the competing claims of China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan to islands in the South China Sea, in a resource-hungry world where who controls the maritime resources within the 200-mile economic exclusion zones around those islands is a very big deal, indeed?

I am not for a moment expecting you to have ready answers for any of these questions. These are, as current jargon puts it, “wicked problems.” No one has ready answers for them. What I am suggesting is that your work has a global context and that those who search for solutions to problems that may look straightforward when the focus is restricted to First Nations versus the Canadian state may need to broaden their perspective, both to better understand resistance to what they propose and to find allies with whom common ground can be found.

Thank you! The workshop looks like it was very interesting. I hope that readers see this link to your project site and add their thoughts!

Best,

Zoe