Intercultural Spaces of Law: Translating Invisibilities (Law and Visual Jurisprudence, 10)

This book proposes an interdisciplinary methodology for developing an intercultural use of law so as to include cultural differences and their protection within legal discourse; this is based on an analysis of the sensory grammar tacitly included in categorizations. This is achieved by combining the theoretical insights provided by legal theory, anthropology and semiotics with a reading of human rights as translational interfaces among the different cultural spaces in which people live. To support this use of human rights’ semantic and normative potential, a specific cultural-geographic view dubbed ‘legal chorology’ is employed. Its primary purpose is to show the extant continuity between categories and spaces of experience, and more specifically between legal meanings and the spatial dimensions of people’s lives.

Through the lens of legal chorology and the intercultural, translational use of human rights, the book provides a methodology that shows how to make space and lawreciprocally transformative so as to create an inclusive legal grammar that is equidistant from social cultural differences. The analysis includes: a critical view on opportunities for intercultural secularization; the possibility of construing a legal grammar of quotidian life that leads to an inclusive equidistance from differences rather than an unachievable neutrality or an all-encompassing universal legal ontology; an interdisciplinary methodology for legal intercultural translation; a chorological reading of the relationships between human rights protection and lived spaces; and an intercultural and geo-semiotic examination of a series of legal cases and current issues such as indigenous peoples’ rights and the international protection of sacred places.

Mario Ricca is a Full Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Parma (Italy). He has worked for many years in legal, educational, scientific, human rights, political, medical, geographical, religious, and anthropological contexts towards the establishment and dissemination of his original and unique methodology of Intercultural Law. His prolific scientific publications in both Italian and English and spanning more than a dozen books and countless essays go beyond mere interdisciplinarity, putting legal practice, theory of law, philosophy, history, cognitive science and above all semiotics in fruitful dialogue.