Language:
German
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (20 Seiten)
Series Statement:
BAB Working Paper 2022/01
Keywords:
Kanada Indianer, Kanada
;
Erzählung
;
Orale Tradition
;
Oralität
;
Recht, traditionelles
Abstract:
This essay asks how oral narratives can come to constitute customary law. I will argue that they can and should be understood as legal texts, but that such an understanding both requires and generates a rethinking of law itself: oral narratives are not just law, and they are law in ways profoundly different from European law. 2 Rather than proposing yet another definition of law under which to subsume oral narratives, however, I propose to "listen" for what ideas about law the narrative itself might contain. This approach allows us to think through oral narratives as law without rigidly defining them as such, thus generating a responsive, dialogical, and open-ended way of identifying customary law. Firstly, I suggest that customary law should be understood as an ascriptive concept whose boundaries are shifting and historically contingent. In doing so, I move away from questions about what law is, towards questions about what it means to claim something as law in the (settler-)colonial context. Secondly, I examine how court proceedings on aboriginal title in Canada have provoked reconceptualisations of both oral tradition and law. Finally, I turn to the genre of Otjiherero praise-poetry, showing why and how we can study them as legal texts without positing a definition of law.
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