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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …
Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic And Anthropological Knowledge, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.