Intercultural Law, Interdisciplinary Outlines (original) (raw)

In this essay, "culture" is understood as "cultural competence," synonymous to our human talent for endlessly modelling the spaces in which we construct our lives. Thus the legal relevance of cultural differences will be taken as an issue of semiotic distance between the realities of how people live in a cultural pluriverse, and the ways in which institutions and legal structures react. The concern will focus not so much upon cultural symbols as already reified topics of conflict between politically or socially polarized groups, but rather on the daily cultural issues that lie out of sight and yet, perhaps precisely for this reason, become widespread sources of conflict. Bridging the semiotic distance that increases with each encounter of different cultural agents is a semiotic enterprise which aims to invent a new world, one that is open to a functional and transactional coexistence of difference. The undertaking of such an endeavour implies, in my view, a cognitive and ethical commitment rooted, as we shall see, in the semiotic and pragmatic. From this perspective, Otherness – at least in the medium and long term – must be considered to be politically inevitable and undeniable. For it is an integral part of the common future, the Other from us and the Other of us, existing in synchrony. I propose an intercultural legal approach that aims to bridge two worlds of experiences and thoughts. It intends to interrelate the theoretical analysis of cross-cultural communication between different le-gal/cultural universes of discourse and the daily interactions of people and practitioners of law. Focus-ing on the problems faced daily by individuals with differing cultural competences, the legal intercul-tural approach is designed to assess how to better integrate different ways of life with laws, rules and practical schemes of behaviour. In this field of inquiry, the anthropology of law and intercultural law clearly overlap. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the methodologies and issues of the two disciplines remain distinct. Anthropological legal research focuses on the analysis of diverse legal systems and the modalities, more or less jarring, of their interactions. Anthropological legal pluralism is the disciplinary area that confronts these conflicts. It works either by assessing events (specific situations of conflict), or, at times, by reflecting more speculatively, fundamentally looking to define what is Âlaw.Ê In both cases, the lens of observation, although socially participated, processes normative concerns, namely rules. Hence, the collisions among legal systems at issue are handled as questions of translation and accommodation within a universe, nay a pluriverse, of normative statements or standards. However rich with theoretical and cultural cues, this working ground is but an abstraction or an outcome of abstract processes. As such, it implies that the normative encyclopaedias might collide and eventually conflate by themselves , in a kind of magical convergence.