Multi-Disciplinary Study of Crime

Question 1

What are the primary justifications for punishment?

Answer 1

• Rehabilitation
• Retribution
• Deterrence
• Incapacitation

Question 2

What does Christie mean when he says that lawyers steal conflicts?

Answer 2

Christie
* Victims of crime have lost their right to participate and argues for a court procedure that restores participants to their own conflict
* In Tanzania, parties are center of the courtroom, participation from the audience with inactive judges and no reporters
* Idea of victim oriented court, establishing whether the law was broken, the consider the victims situation with regards to all factors and when this is passed do we think about punishment

Question 3

What problems arise when we transpose domestic penal theories onto international conflict / crimes?

Answer 3

Drumbl
* Despite the extraordinary nature of criminality theories of punishment around them and sentencing remain largely ordinary
* Luban, the enemy of human kind is punished no differently than the car thief
* Argues there is a place for diverse remedies for egregious human rights violations, need to intergrate broader level of responsibility

Crimes are the norm in the context of war, they do not stand out against the backdrop of mass violence. Crimes like genocide are committed by a wide group of people, therefore we have to be very selective in deciding who is prosecuted and blamed for the crime

Question 4

What can athropology and ethnography add to criminological knowledge production?

Answer 4

• Trying to make sense of other people and their way of life can be reflective of our own society and the way in which we do things
• By focusing on the everyday and boring we get a true sense of how people live and how a society actually works
• By rendering the strange familiar and the familiar strange, we can learn more about law. Law should not rely only on punishment but reciprocity, obligation and compliance (Sausdal and Vigh)

Question 5

How does Malinowski challenge views of ‘primitive societies’? What conceptions of law and crime does he develop from his observations?

Answer 5

• Studied the Trobriand Islanders of Papa New Guinea over a combined period of over 2 years
• Ownership and use of a canoe consists of definite obligations and duties, complex system
• Cannot speak of their complex systems of fishing in present-day economic theories because this is misleading, should speak only in fact
• Kula, a ritual which was for rich men to visit neighbouring islands and get shells, representing much value and history
• Definition of law as ‘the body of rules enforced by an authority independent of personal ties’ by Hobhouse is too narrow and does not lay emphasis on the relevant elements
• No society can work unless laws are obeyed willingly and spontaneously

Question 6

In what ways in Malinowski’s (and athropological) work limited?

Answer 6

• Academica is a competitive field, the purpose for which Malinowski was acting might be in order to disprove other people and not to try and fully understand the people he was interacting with
• Malinowski reproduces racialized ordering such as using the ideas of ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’
• Is the anthropologist truly seeing themselves as part of the community which they are studying? Or is there still a sense of them and I?
• Publication of Malinowski’s diaries showed prejudice against Trobirand people, just as much as the old Victorian athropologists he tried to displace
• Perhaps a prisoner of his time? Todays studies would be different (but then can a person ever be free of prejudice)

Question 7

How and why do responses to ‘crimes’ differ in Northern Uganda? What can we learn from these responses in the Global North?

Answer 7

Porter
* Studies the Acholi in Northern Uganda who express a deep cultural value of forgiveness and their response to rape
* The relationship rather than the act shapes the notion of appropriate punishment
* Women have a lack of faith in the justice system
* Attitudes of punishment is affected by her relationship to the perpetrator in the opposite direction, in the global north likely thought of as worse if a woman is raped by her husband
* Pressure to stay and maintain social harmony, social consequences would outweigh the satisfaction of punishment (depending on social community)

Question 8

How has anthropological knowledge production shifted and changed over time?

Answer 8

Sausdal & Vigh
* Anthropology is still a study of the central struggles of social principles, but it is increasingly a study of how these struggles relate with governing principles of the wider world
* Argues for ethnographic engagement, cross-cultural comparison, discovering the ordinary and grounded critiques
* Anthropologists should treat what it means to be human as an open research question rather than a closed analytical category
* Ethnography has critical potential as a method that offers grounded rather than abstract critique

Koch
* Has moved a long way from the study of law in stateless societies to understanding state-citizen relations under conditions of advance liberalism
* Advances a call for a genuinely interdisciplinary study of punishment and the state
* Looks from both top-down and bottom up with state-citizen relations and life on ‘Park End’ council estate