Anthropologie der Gerechtigkeit: Band I und Band II

Justice appears to function as the main legitimating factor in political discourse. Depending on contingent ideological positions, justice generally escapes reflections on its varying foundations. Is it therefore futile to even consider its possible meanings in the field of law, as legal positivists claim? Or, on the contrary, does the very notion of law involve a sense of justice to "justify" its validity? The three volumes of an "anthropology of justice" affirm the later hypothesis by seeking to establish an empirical basis for critical research of "just law". The potential of such a (critical) theory of practice can best be validated in a comparative framework. It is due to slavery that Jamaica reveals a legal pluralist setting which includes African and European traditions of law. These were not merely parallel forms of integration for different peoples but actively opposed against each other in the enslaved struggle for freedom. "1492." Caribbean historiography begins with this ominous date. Labelled as discovery of the world, the enterprise as a whole led to something very different: the covering or "veiling" of the cultural worlds encountered by the Europeans. In many cases the interaction was driven to the extreme: the physical destruction of the "native peoples". Numerous first nations in the Americas and the Caribbean faced genocide. Their manpower was substituted by an "imported nation". Africans were declared as living objects of European trade and forced to enslaved labour. Yet, small groups of Africans fled from the slave ships and the plantations, organized themselves in the interior and transformed their African experiences into new meaningful social organizations. These were called "Maroons", derived from the spanish word "Cimarrn" (for free, wild, unruly). Basing their independence and territorial control on a peace treaty with the british crown in the year 1739, Maroon societies still stand as "states within a state". The author`s empirical interest centers on the reconstruction of the Maroon-law within the comparative context of Westafrican legal orders. It is on this empirical basis that the book seeks to outline an empirical approach to the anthropological study of justice which aims to demonstrate the possible procedural connection between law and justice. For this attempt the discourse-theoretical paradigms of Critical Theory and the praxeological analysis of social relations are combined in one effort.