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In Indonesia, since the time of colonial government, the main source for the determination of land rights has been local, indigenous law. Nonetheless, the state has always attempted to influence the way land is managed. This article traces the changes in justification for this influence, with the example of a conflict over land in a Sumatran village. Every actor in the dispute makes his own choice of argument, and creates his own interpretation of facts, rules, and norms. Not only do legal arguments play a role, but political, cultural, and historical arguments are used. This phenomenon may be called discourse shopping. (Land rights, legal pluralism, Indonesia, dispute settlement, social change) ********** Since the start of active colonial administration of Indonesian internal affairs, the government has influenced the way in which local communities deal with property rights. Periods of liberalism, "ethical politics," and independence all needed different conceptualizations of property rights. Ethical politics was opposed to the liberalism of colonial policy and showed a "paternalistic concern for the welfare of Indonesia's native population, presumed to be threatened by untrammeled commercial development and westernisation" (Kahn 1993:187). Indigenous property rights, contained in adat (customary law), had to be adapted and manipulated for this purpose (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1999). The different interests of the parties and the subsequent differing ways in which adat was interpreted have led to a situation in which the status of many plots of land is not clear. Communal land especially suffered from this insecurity, since both the concept of communities as well as the rights they could or should exercise on the land were often changed. At this moment, the Indonesian legal system is still one of overt legal pluralism, with adat, state law, and religious law all being recognized by the state. (2) Property rights are still a source of great insecurity in contemporary Indonesia. With the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960 and the constitution of 1945, the government has given itself the right to contest village rights to natural resources, including communal land and water sources, in the name of the public interest. This has led to numerous conflicts in which, until recently, the voice of villagers was muted by the ruling elite. The land dispute in this article illustrates this kind of insecurity. Arguments appear to be framed in a vocabulary that is thought to be appropriate and likely to be effective. As Tanner (1969:24) indicates, "law, religious and customary principles, and new values are not simply guidelines for dispute settlement, but become, often in the context of protracted discussion and deliberation, the currency of symbolic barter." This means that people do not automatically use the arguments with which they would be identified first, or choose the vocabulary which they would be expected to use according to their place in society. Villagers sometimes frame their arguments in terms of state law, whereas state civil servants may use adat rhetoric. The parties involved in a conflict can use both state law as well as other normative orders in a flexible way (von Benda-Beckmann 1985). While the way disputes are framed, and the role of the different normative orders in the process of dispute settlement, have often been described (e.g., Comaroff and Roberts 1977; Moore 1978), the case presented here illustrates that not only legal arguments but arguments based on history, politics, and power were applied in a way that changed when economic and political conditions changed. People show enormous creativity in the way they seek to employ these different kinds of discourse, in a process that could be described as discourse shopping, as an analogy to the notions of "forum shopping" (von Benda-Beckmarm 1984) and "idiom shopping" (Spiertz 1986). The multitude of claims, interests, interpretations of rights and norms, and facts that are used by the parties to the dispute form an excellent example of the functioning of a society with overt legal pluralism, and of the importance of power relations in the development of conflict resolution. …

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) In the first line of the article on ritual purity in Encyclopedia Judaica, we read that purity is "a concept that a person or object can be in a state which, by religious law, prevents the person or object from having any contact with the temple or its cult."1 A number of more recent studies have adopted a similar view, claiming that the purity laws of Second Temple Judaism derive their essential warrant from the existence of the temple cult. In the present study, I refer to such a view as "minimalist" and argue that, in Second Temple times, there was no necessary connection between purity and the temple. I. Critique of the Minimalist View I must first attend to an important study that puzzlingly combines aspects of both the minimalist and maximalist views: E. P. Sanders's Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (London: SCM, 1990). By correcting universal misconceptions about ritual purity, and by provoking further investigations into these issues, Sanders has successfully moved the scholarly discussion of ritual purity laws and practices to a higher level. Sanders's principal objective was to overturn the view, represented chiefly by Gedalyahu Alon and Jacob Neusner, that the Pharisees applied the laws of priestly purity to their own lives. As Sanders argues, Alon and Neusner made a series of mistaken assumptions regarding both the biblical and the Pharisaic purity laws: "It is not the case . . . that the purity laws of the Bible affect only the temple and the priesthood. Some scholars . . . mistakenly think that 'the settled halakah' of purity had to do only with these, but that is not so even in biblical law."2 Unfortunately, Sanders allows the view that he is challenging to determine his options. Although he demonstrates that the purity halakah went beyond the temple, he continues to regard the sanctity of the temple as the motivating principle behind purity in general, even to the point of formulating Pharisaic practice as "a minor gesture toward living like priests." In this respect, even Sanders has not broken completely free of the minimalist understanding. He writes that, for most of the daily threats to ritual purity, "[t]he only consequence of the impurity is nonaccess to the temple."3 Others have charged Sanders with underestimating the daily impact of ritual purity. This charge is based on his comments on the impracticability of avoiding all forms of impurity and on his dismissal of Mark 7:1-23 as evidence for Pharisaic hand washing before meals. In deciding whether he is guilty of minimalizing the daily impact of ritual purity, however, it should be noted that he often uses the term "purity" when he really refers to the hypothetical application of specifically priestly purity requirements to non-priests (as held by Alon, Neusner, and others). According to Sanders, "People who say that the Pharisees handled all food in purity have not paid attention to the realities of life."4 Despite the welcome infusion of historical imagination, the difficulty that Sanders outlines obtains only with respect to the common belief that the Pharisees observed a priestly level of food purity. Given the presumed effect of their regimen of hand washing, there is nothing realistically remarkable about their efforts to "eat ordinary food in purity," so long as we understand "purity" according to a non-priestly standard. Sanders mentions that the institution of tebul yom would have answered the problem of daily purity, but he asserts, on the basis of their opposition to the "morning bathers" in t. Yad. 2.20, that the Pharisees did not avail themselves of that device frequently enough to live a life of priestly purity. By dissolving the definitional monopoly of the priestly view, however, we open the question of daily purity to resolution through hand washing, rather than immersion. It is not unlikely that the morning bathers were simply a group of pietists who consciously opposed the Pharisaic expedient of hand washing. …

Susan F. Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xix + 360 pages. $48.00 cloth; $19.00 paper. In her book Susan Hirsch explores how Swahili Muslim women in the Kenyan coastal cities of Mombasa and Malindi pursue marital disputes in local Kadhi's (Islamic) courts. Focusing in particular on the Malindi Kadhi's court, Hirsch highlights how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform the religious and local norms that underlie their disadvantaged position in this Swahili community in postcolonial Kenya. In her microlevel study, based on empirical work featuring court records, court observations, and participation in everyday life in the community, the author offers a nuanced analysis highlighting the ways in which women are both constrained and empowered in this setting where customary law, religious law, Western law, and social norms concerning male and female speech intersect and interact. Although constraints derived from local and religious norms operate to urge compliance with social convention that projects women as persevering wives who should suffer in silence in relation to their pronouncing husbands, some women are, nonetheless, able to negotiate these stereotypes to circumvent male power. Hirsch's study details the process whereby some Muslim women who resist patriarchal norms are silenced while others succeed in transforming the perception of womanhood to their advantage in their disputes with their husbands. Indeed, Hirsch's observation is that despite problems in the past, the majority of marital conflicts handled by the local Kadhi's court are initiated and won by women. Integral to her analysis is the way in which women and men in these communities in East Africa are constituted as gendered subjects, which is not to be treated as a given, derived from a hegemonic form of discourse, but which is created through the use of language that draws on institutional and cultural conventions for producing speech, thus giving rise to differing forms of discourse in specific contexts. This practice allows for gender to be "made, remade, and transformed in fundamental ways through legal institutions and the discourses of disputing" (p. 3). Engaging language at the level of sociolinguistic theory, Hirsch convincingly demonstrates that it is not merely the vehicle through which legal power operates, but it also constitutes legal power itself, being at once the cause and effect of linguistic interactions taking place on a daily basis in Kadhi's courts. Although her study centers on local courts, Hirsch's detailed and careful analysis of the ways in which men and women negotiate their legal claims contributes to a broader set of debates concerning the representation of knowledge and its relationship with gender, ethnography, and law. Gender and Legal Discourse: An Ethnographic Perspective Feminist scholars (Lacey 1992; Smart 1989, 1992, 1995; MacKinnon 1983, 1987; Fineman 1983, 1991; White 1991; Minow 1986) have long been critical of mainstream legal discourse because it fails to take adequate, if any, account of women's voices, practices, and experiences in its analysis of law. Such a discourse, which centers on law-as-text-through a rigorous exposition of doctrinal analysis founded on a specific set of sources and institutions-upholds an image of law that sets it apart from social life. It promotes an image of autonomy that is used to maintain law's power and authority over social relations in general, thereby sustaining a notion of hierarchy while maintaining an image of neutrality and equality within its own domain. This image of law has been contested by feminists, among others,1 because it refuses to acknowledge the gendered world in which women and men live, a world in which the reality of power and authority-acquired through a coalescence of economic, social, political, and ideological factors-undercuts the prescribed status of individual equality and neutrality accorded by law. …

During the latter part of the twentieth century, Islamic law or shari'a has had an increasingly practical influence on the types of cases adjudicated in American courts. As the Muslim population continues to grow, the American legal system will inevitably face interesting, complex family law questions that are intertwined with Islamic law. While religious denominations have a genuine and continuing interest in marriage and its rights and obligations, religious laws are clearly subordinate to state secular law. A religious marriage is valid only to the extent that it complies with a state's statutory requirements. Likewise, state statutes regulate divorce and designate specific state courts as the forum for the divorce proceeding. Since marriage and divorce are controlled by secular state law, it is insufficient for Muslims to adhere solely to the shari'a on these matters. However, as the state continues to cede some of its traditional authority in favor of increased private ordering of the institution of marriage, religious adherents are looking to contracts as a means to abide by religious precepts and secular law. These contracts provide methods whereby “parties agree to internal (religious law) resolutions of marital disputes, but the agreement itself is enforceable by the external authorities.”

The end of the 20th century demonstrates not only a series of encounters between different religious and ethnic traditions but also between such traditions and secularism. An example for the latter is the cultural phenomenon of Jewish Religious Law vis-a-vis Modernization and Postmodernism. The following may therefore be seen as a case study illustrating the problems and options arising in such encounters during the next century.Jewish religious law (halakhah) is that part of Jewish tradition, defining a Jew's duties towards God and fellow human beings. It is part of a more comprehensive concept, the divine teaching (torah), including narratives (agadah) as well as law (halakhah), and morals (derekh ‘erets) as well as matters of faith ('emunah). This teaching is contained not only in the Pentateuch and in Holy Scripture, but even more so in the oral traditions of the sages. Morals and faith are therefore complementaries to Jewish religious law, and rules of the second order to control it.

acquainted with the roots or sources of the Druze waqf, nor does he know when, to what extent, and how it was influenced by Islam. To answer these questions, we should have to be familiar with Druze religio-legal literature of the time prior to the last great exegete of Druze religious law, Shaykh 'Abdall~h al-Tanfikhi (d. A.H. 885/1480 C.E.),(1) and, of course, to study Druze legal documents (especially wills) of different periods. The conclusions of this paper are therefore tentative.

Prophecy is used among the Apostles of John Maranke, an indigenous African church, to structure religious and everyday interactions. The prophetic account has a dialogical format and consists of the prophet's assertion and the candidate's response. Prophecies are performed at the beginning of every formal Apostolic ceremony. Each prophecy contains a short narrative about the subject's moral and spiritual state. Apostolic prophecy is a form of social drama in Victor Turner's sense of the term and a system of expression that shapes the universe of church members' spiritual discourse (see Turner 1957:91-94 and I974:37-45). Moreover, prophecy is an ecstatic expression that serves as an important means of social control among Apostles. Here, I will analyze the dramaturgical and dialogical structure of Apostolic prophecy as a ceremonial performance and an alternative system of linguistic and religious expression. The relationship between the narrative structure of prophecy and the prophetic reading as an act of social control will be examined. This analysis necessitates an emphasis on prophecies as verbal exchanges within the performative context of Apostolic ceremonies. In 1971, after having studied the Apostolic Church ofJohn Maranke for two years, I joined the group. Although many personal and circumstantial factors motivated my decision to join, it is undeniable that the process of conversion was dramatic for me and that now, over a decade and a half later, I still find that my life and my perception of "the religious experience" have been unalterably transformed as a result of my membership. I came to see Apostolic prophecy not only as a performance within a liturgically structured narrative but also as a moral act that had serious consequences for my own decisions and behavior. The moral impact of prophecy is reinforced by its performance as a type of ethnotheatre, intended to reinforce for the candidate the social and religious codes of Apostolic membership and to coax the candidate into conformity with aspects of religious morality and doctrine. Prophecy, however, is not a "morality play" that leaves the candidate with an abstract lesson. It is a thoroughly lived experience in which idealized lessons are intended for immediate daily application in every aspect of the candidate's life. Apostolic prophecy reanimates the relationship between religious law and spiri

Non-Muslim minorities within an Islamic state do not enjoy rights equal to those of the Muslim majority. Some apologist Muslim writers have tended to misrepresent Shari'ah, the historical religious law of the Muslims, in order to minimize the seriousness of discrimination against nonMuslims. Such an approach is futile not only because the misrepresentation can easily be exposed, but also because current public opinion is unwilling to tolerate any degree or form of discrimination on grounds of religion or belief. On a practical level, although most of the constitutions of modern Muslim states guarantee against religious discrimination, most of these constitutions also authorize the application of Shari'ah. As such, these constitutions sanction discrimination against religious minorities. This is inconsistent with the constitutions' own terms. The existence of such contradictions, and the underlying tensions they reflect, call for urgent and candid discussion of this problem. Moreover, the constitutions of some Muslim countries, such as Iran, have already openly approved of discrimination on grounds of religion.' If the current trend towards what is commonly known as Islamic fundamentalism continues, it may not be long before other Muslim countries follow suit.

Merry's comprehensive review shows us how studies of plural normative orderings during the past twenty-five years have greatly enriched our understanding of the complexity of normative structures, their interdependence and the ways in which these structures are involved in human agency. At the same time her review illustrates how little conceptual progress has been made. We do not have a more acute understanding nor a refined conceptual usage of the terms law, normative order, or pluralism. In a way this is reassuring. It tells us that stimulating new research and methodological approaches can be developed without giving much thought to these conceptual problems. The best historical writings in legal pluralism in colonial societies, such as the Dutch studies on Indonesian societies, did not excessively ponder whether the local normative systems should or should not be called law. The neo-classicists of legal pluralism such as Macaulay (1963) and Moore (1973) explicitly did not present their data as legal pluralism, and when Galanter (1981) tells us about indigenous law in western societies he does not make much fuss about it. Yet I do think that more conceptual clarity is desirable. Legalistic ideology has not yet been fully banned from the research methodology of sociolegal studies. Ideological bias is not barred from methodology by simply calling non-state normative systems law. Most studies in legal or normative pluralism, whatever their definition of law may be, still tend to recognize only a limited number of contexts in which the reproduction of elements from the legal system is really a legal process. Typically, it is judges (or other representatives of the state, by preference of the judicial apparatus), or more generally legal authorities, whose activity make the process legal. Reproduction of state law by ordinary citizens is not considered legal. This thinking is deeply ingrained in the methodology of sociolegal scholars (K. von Benda-Beckmann 1984: 103-107); it also colors the analyses of the "creation of customary law," to which Merry refers (F. von Benda-Beckmann, 1984). Descriptions of normative systems should include their ideologies, their claims to exclusive validity and to the monopoly of legitimate power, etc., as empirical phenomena. It is here that we encounter the ideology of legal centralism as the folk system of state officials and legal scientists. We may find similar legal ideologies in religious law or folk legal systems. But we may also find situa

Contrary to prevailing paradigms of modernization and secularization, I contend that extremism is the religious norm, and that it is not religious extremism but religious moderation that requires explanation. Relying on impressions from contemporary Judaism, extremism is defined here as the desire to expand the scope, detail and strictness of religious law; social isolation; and the rejection of the surrounding culture. Religious extremism is an impulse or an orientation which, when objectified in persons and institutions, is invariably moderated. Religious moderation can be accounted for by the mixed motivations of religious adherents, either individuals or groups, who temper their "religious" impulses in order to achieve "non-religious" goals at the individual or communal level. Religious moderation may be a strategy to persuade or convert others, or to protect the religious community itself against a hostile environment. In all instances, moderation is associated with religious prestige and strong communal commitments. The decline of the religious community permits the breakthrough of extremist tendencies. This is facilitated by the decline of the secular culture with which the religious moderates were associated. This theory is applied to two types of Jewish religious extremism in Israel, one anti-nationalist and the other ultra-nationalist in orientation.

in Holon, Israel. The Samaritans call themselves "guardians of the Law", in Hebrew shomrim or shomronim ; they feel that their observance of the Biblical laws is far stricter than that of the Jews, with whom they had a common history until the year one thousand B. C. E., when the Samaritans separated because of certain religious disputes. Jewish historians, however, maintain that the term Samaritan derives from the city of Samaria; the Samaritan observances of religious law are not stricter but of a different kind; and that the final separation of the Samaritan sect from its Jewish parent-body took place about six hundred years later in 332 B.C. E., when a rival Temple was established on Mount Gerizim.1 The strongest link between the Samaritans and the Jews is the reading and the chanting of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, which constitutes the basis of both religions. The specific chanting of the Hebrew Bible is termed cantillation. Cantillation proceeds according to special graphic signs attached to every word of the text. These cantillation motifs are called accents by European and ta'ame hamiqra by Hebrew grammarians. The Hebrew ta'ame hamiqra as used by Jews all over the world have 3 purposes: 1. the accentuation of the syllable, which can be pre-positive or post-positive (Hebr. mil'el or milra)

EVERY modern society has been faced with problems arising from inequalities among the various groups of which it is composed, particularly since the eighteenth-century proclamation in America that "all men are created equal," and the elaboration in France of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The differences which produced inequality have been variouseconomic, social, racial, linguistic, religious, political-and variously intertwined. In the Near East until very recent times the major boundary lines between groups, and therefore the principal barriers to a homogeneous society of equals, have been religious. Although today social and economic disparities in Near Eastern society have vastly increased as modern technology and finance have provided greater opportunities for getting and spending, and although nationalist rivalries now challenge the primacy of religious rivalries, it is still often true that religion is the dividing line, and that a man's creed is his distinguishing mark. In the Ottoman Empire of the early nineteenth century his religion provided a man's label, both in his own conceptual scheme and in the eyes of his neighbors and his governors. He was a Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Jew, Catholic, or Protestant before he was a Turk or Arab, a Greek or Bulgar, in the national sense, and also before he felt himself an Ottoman citizen. The Ottoman government, by granting official recognition to these millet's, as the religious communities were called, had preserved and even emphasized the religious distinctions. The empire itself was governed by Muslims; its law was based on the religious law of Islam. But within this empire the several Christian communities and the Jewish community enjoyed a partial autonomy, whereby the ecclesiastical hierarchy which administered the millet supervised not only the religious, educational