Law, Language, and Subject: Normative Creolization on China's Silk Road

Date
Feb 10, 2014, 12:00 pm12:00 pm
Location
202 Jones Hall

Speaker

Details

Event Description

Co-sponsored with The Department and Program in Near Eastern Studies.

Abstract

Matthew S. Erie

Postdoctoral Research Associate,

Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies

“Law, Language, and Subject: Normative Creolization on China’s Silk Road”

Based on nineteen months of fieldwork with Chinese Muslims (Hui) in Northwest China, this article revises the analytic of legal pluralism, a mainstay in the anthropology of law, through what I term normative creolization. I take inspiration from Caribbean anthropologists’ critique of pluralism via creolization to analyze poly-ethnic studies. While Caribbeanists invoke creolization, itself originating in linguistic analysis, to explain ethnicity, I employ the concept to illuminate the category of law. Hui practice what I call Han shariʿa, a creolization of shariʿa and non-Islamic customs that is regulated or prohibited by state socialist law. Just as communities of believers known as “teaching schools” have different relationships to different ‘parent’ languages in their creole language, so too do teaching schools prescribe different ways of making sense of their creolized law. I use Hui "finance law", specifically voluntary donations and pious endowments, to illustrate the ways in which Hui understand their law.