[lbo-talk] demotic cuisine

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Sat Feb 13 09:36:26 PST 2010


At 08:46 AM 2/13/2010, Eric Beck wrote:


>I like that he talks about principles, "reparation and
>reconciliation," but I wonder about the
>need to hold on to the institution, "a justice system." Is it really
>impossible to conceive of how to address socially damaging behaviors
>without a set of preformed institutions to enforce them?

Angela Davis likes to talk about prison abolition because she wants it to resonate with people's knowledge of slavery abolition. She says that just as slavery used to be thought of as something as natural as air, so now people think of prison as part of the natural social fabric.

One thing I've been talking about is how when we think of "a justice system" we generally do what Davis is talking about. That is, a phrase like"justice system" brings to mind ideas about control and cops. That's what you kept turning what I was saying about decisions concerning people's conduct into. I said nothing about control.

I liked Doug's example of thou shalt not kill because in the bible that was the first "criminal justice" problem. What Adam and Eve did with the apple was between them and their lord. Thou shalt not kill comes from Cain and Abel.

But it doesn't have to be such extreme behavior that calls for response. In our little community here a few people have been banished because Doug thought they weren't conducting themselves properly. I've yet to see anyone disagree with his decision.

Here's another bit of info that sheds some light I think. Over the last 30 years or so, historical research that is mostly centered at UCLA has concentrated on documents in Nahuatl. We now have a lot of document based research about the Nahua (a group of American Indians living in Mexico and Central America), starting from the Spanish conquest forward. (Over a million people still speak Nahuatl).

Until around 1970 historians working on Latin America did most of their research in Spain. Documents housed in Latin America were hardly looked at. When people finally started looking around in Mexico they found all these documents written in Nahuatl,using Latin characters. (This development happened quickly. Within 20 years after Spaniards came to Mexico, the Nahua were composing texts in their own language using Latin characters).

I bring this up here because the overwhelming majority of the Nahuatl texts that historians have found concern legal cases. Nahua suing Nahua.. The point being, the adversarial legal system is not something "Western" that's been mechanically imposed everywhere. It's something that seems to make sense across cultures. At least we have a lot of evidence that's the case.

That's a long way of answering your question about can we conceive of how to address disruptive or damaging behavior without preformed institutions. I don't know. But as Chuck said, we haven't yet.



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