Droit et cultures Special issue 2004

Although Droit et cultures mainly focuses on the anthropology of law, it is open to approaches to studying the law via other human and social sciences. For several years now, it has run articles relevant to legal consciousness and its origins in socialization processes, in particular in the legal socialization that occurs during childhood and adolescence. In 1998, this journal brought out a special issue (35) presenting theoretical articles with the results of several qualitative, American and French, studies on these two topics.
The current issue of Droit et cultures, in an effort to further a dialog started several years ago, seeks to inform English-speaking readers of the results from recent surveys conducted in France and elsewhere by researchers from Belgium, France, Hungary, Sweden and Russia, who, since the early 1990s, have joined around the French team to study legal socialization and consciousness. (Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven, CNRS) In the essays collected in this special issue of Droit et cultures, we find something of the fascination of Williams - in Keywords - with the intellectual and historical shape of social change and the dilemmas of interpretation arising pot only for analysts but also for people trying to live their own everyday lives.
With respect to the present set of keywords, they reveal the extent to which vernacular ideas of law and legality are both embedded in social (even personal) experience, and themselves integral to the very concept of experience, and its articulation. To be sure, the origins of the present study are not in the serendipity of refamiliarization but in the methodologies of sociology, psychology and sociolegal studies ; still, the rhetorical contours of these essays are significant in themselves, as evidence of a rapidly shifting topography of modern life in Russia, as well as in Belgium, Hungary, and the United States.
(Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University)