Page 34 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 9

The Construction of ‘Cultural-Political’ Objects

In the classical approach of political science, an existing legal system—
or for that matter, any system—would be reduced to a textual, dis-
cursive foundation of power relations between citizens, groups and the
diverse institutions that constitute a state. But should a legal code be
necessarily construed as a rational and externally enforced dispensa-
tion or the unstable outcome of negotiated confrontations between a
wide range of social partners with different cultural ethos?
In contrast to this static—and, to some extent, essentialist—vision,
Karine Bates’s essay, ‘The Indian Legal System: A Unique Combina-
tion of Traditions, Practices and Modern Values’, is representative of
a fruitful investigation of the ‘culture versus power’ dialectic. Bates
reviews the Indian legal system in its implementation, interpretation
and actual practice, with a particular focus on women rights across
several historical periods dating back to pre-British India. From this
perspective, contradictory and conflictual aspects of the system appear
as the outcome of various attempts to ‘frame out and supervise soci-
ety, notably in its dimensions of power’ (Martin 2002: 79) that the
collective actors—the caste, the village, Moghul and British rulers,
etc.—imprinted with their own cultural prejudice and world-views.
From this angle, the formal system of power—the visible part of
that iceberg that we named the ‘political’ —appears as a multilayered
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sedimentation of ‘cultural objects’, whereby culture, as a milieu of con-
frontation, could be equated to connections plus innovation (ibid.: 17).
Thus, cultural-political ‘objects’ are the pieces of a landscape whose
configuration changes over time and space, as it strongly depends on
the location of its observer.
Just as the individual is never simply an individual, because he is
always involved with others, so too the closed horizon that is sup-
posed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement
of human life consists in the fact that it is never utterly bound to any
one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. The
horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves
with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving. (Gadamer
1985: 271)