“From Cases to Causes in East Asian Societies”, forthcoming issue,
Dear colleagues,
Please find below the call for papers for a forthcoming issue of Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident:
From Cases to Causes in East Asian Societies
Legal norms are regularly transgressed, in any society, without arousing collective attention. Those catching it are “cases” (or “affaires” as they are called in French) that originate in the judicial realm but gain a larger dimension through public stances whose types and outlets are subject, over time, to change. Out of these interventions, which are not limited to the space of the press, can emerge “causes” that mobilize more or less. Several disciplines have confronted this phenomenon, including history, sociology, and anthropology. The 1990s work of Élisabeth Claverie on the Calas and Chevalier de la Barre cases pioneeringly analyzed the public response process then initiated by Voltaire to turn both trials into exemplary ones. At the same time in the United States, Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold gave birth to the cause lawyering scholarship that deals with the activism of legal professionals and has since expanded as demonstrated by the research of Rachel Stern and Eva Pils for China or Celeste Arrington for Japan and South Korea.
A case (or “affaire”), which must be distinguished from a “scandal” as shown by Cyril Lemieux and Damien de Blic (Politix n°71, 2005), is defined in the 2007 volume Affaires, scandales et grandes causes : De Socrate à Pinochet (edited by Luc Boltanski, Élisabeth Claverie, Nicolas Offenstadt and Stéphane Van Damme) as a moment of test for ordinary categories, such as statuses and values. Based on various case studies from Antiquity to the present day, the book ends by calling for more specialists of non-European cultural areas to join this line of research. As far as East Asia is concerned, one should note that Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan on the one hand, Paul Jobin on the other have participated in the above studies by respectively examining the Sun Zhigang scandal and the Minamata case. Their approach asks what a case alters and not only reveals about a given social order, differentiating itself from the microhistorical tradition that has spearheaded a renewal in the analysis of legal cases and sources over the past decades (among the classics, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, 1976, and Jonathan Spencer, The Death of Woman Wang, 1979).
We offer here to continue interrogating what is at stake for a society in the surfacing of a “case” based on East Asian experiences. We therefore invite contributions from diverse disciplinary and temporal horizons, unrestricted to law or the last two centuries, to investigate the trajectory of single or multiple cases contemplating: How and why some cases but not others engender collective attention? Which move away from the judicial realm to enter the public space? Which go as far as bringing about forms of mobilization? Which categories are then tested and to which extent? In other words, under which conditions does a case become a cause? Which actors are involved in this transformation? Following which logics, not only strategic but also representational? Through which sources, media and discourses? With which effects?
Such are the main questions that this thematic issue of Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident plans to explore. Special awareness will be given to the lexicon deployed in the frame of the selected cases, to be probed in the different contexts under consideration – thus, for instance, the term jiken (Japanese), sakkŏn (Korean), shijian (Chinese), sự kiện (Vietnamese) invariably corresponding to the sinograms 事件.
Proposals for papers, in English or in French, should be addressed to the two editors of the journal: matthias.hayek@ephe.psl.eu and pierre-emmanuel.roux@u-paris.fr, as well as to Justine Guichard: justine.guichard@u-paris.fr, guest editor for this issue.
If you are interested in contributing to this issue, the editors kindly ask you to submit a tentative title and an abstract by September 15, 2023.
Full manuscripts should be submitted no later than January 15, 2024 and follow the submission guidelines outlined here.
