Suchergebnisse

When I was thinking of going to law school, I went to speak with a law
professor at the university where I had done my PhD. 'Well, Mr. Rosen,'
he said, 'the thing about law school is it will teach you how to think.'
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: think about law, think like
a lawyer. No, he meant think – period. With all due humility, I was at
that time coming from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
NJ, and should like to imagine that I had actually learned a few things
while doing my doctorate at his own university. In the forty years since,
while serving as an adjunct professor of law and visiting professor at
several such institutions, I have also encountered the occasional law
scholar who, in a moment of academic noblesse oblige, has regarded my
anthropology credentials as quaint but insufficient evidence that one
has the tough-minded capacity that flows from a legal education. The
lawyers may pay some attention to a few other disciplines, but, even
though they may have given in to the allure of economics and bolstered
their intellectual self-image with the odd philosopher or historian, the
question remains why the law schools still tend to regard anthropology
as almost entirely irrelevant.

The author gives an account of the young men and women who join the religiously oriented political groupings Al Adl and the PJD in contemporary Morocco. He stresses that these organizations are not hierarchically organized and do not simply direct their members' activities. Rather, they encourage a good deal of freedom of choice among their members. Indeed, the competition for members leads each movement to foster such choice. The result is an analysis from the perspective of those aged from their teens to their early thirties who have cast their lot with either of these two rather different organizations—one declared illegal by the regime and denying the monarchy's claim to religious oversight, the other receiving substantial support from the regime and so involved in party politics that it has held the Prime Minister's office for the past seven years. While essentially a study of a single country and the relation of its youth to several Islamic political organizations the author's analysis may be relevant to the study of Islamist parties elsewhere in the Arab world.

The war in Afghanistan incorporates a series of questionable anthropological assumptions. Quite aside from the involvement of anthropologists in the war's "human terrain projects," the current administration has continued a mistaken view of the tribes of the region, the reasons why there have been no attacks on the American homeland from the Afghan-Pakistan border region, the nature of suicide bombing, and the reasons why a singular model for all counterinsurgency plans may fail. By carefully analyzing these assumptions, anthropologists may offer a more refined critique of their own work and the goals of the present war.