No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Belonging, Identity, and Identification - Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108606967.
Review products
Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108606967.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2022
Abstract
Belonging and the sense of belonging are vital factors of human identity, loyalty, and roles, the expectations we have of ourselves and of one another. The boundaries, social and sexual, that all human societies deploy to protect personal privacy and personal and group dignity are modulated by our sense of belonging and often by a complementary sense of difference. The bonds of affinity and the corresponding sense of belonging that modulate our norms and roles are perhaps most visible in the striking colorations they assume in the eyes of outsiders viewing the mores of traditional societies. But the vital necessity of a sense of shared identity is all the more critical when social identities are fragmented by faction, tribalism, or racism, or when anomie and alienation have sapped the sense of commitment that energizes collaborative efforts in any human group. Few dimensions of personal outlook and awareness are more powerful in communal, legal, or political settings than the sense of belonging, that curiously shared identity by which we bind ourselves and one another to shared goals and values in some version of the sense that we are one.
- Type
- Book Review Symposium on Kinship, Law, and Politics
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
References
1 Readers familiar with the work and influence of Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) may be less so with Maimonides, and those at home with Maimonides may be less familiar with the impact of Whorf. Whorf’s deep study of languages, beginning with biblical Hebrew but extending to Meso-American languages like Nahuatl, the Uto-Aztecan language family, Mayan hieroglyphics, Hopi, Pima, and Tepecano, led him to propose that languages bear distinct categoreal schemes—a thought championed by exponents of linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism but rejected by defenders of cultural and linguistic universalism. In fairness to Whorf, those implications of his work may have been overstated both by the exponents and the adversaries of such relativism and determinism. In describing my own approach here as “more Maimonidean” I allude to Maimonides’s view that languages, although conventional, reflect rather than simply determine the ethos of their users. See Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip Lieberman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), III 8, 3.14b (The forthcoming translation is based on the critical edition of the original Judaeo-Arabic text, prepared by S. Munk, Le Guide des Égarés, traité de Théologie et de Philosophie par Moïse ben Maimon, publié pour la première fois dans l’original Arabe, et accompagné d’une traduction Française et de notes critiques, littéraires et explicatives [Guide to the perplexed, treatise on theology and philosophy by Moses ben Maimon, published for the first time in the original Arabic, and accompanied by a French translation and critical, literary and explanatory notes], ed. S. Munk [Paris, 1850–1866]). As for categoreal schemes, philosophers, poets, rhetoricians, and, yes, advertisers, work freely to devise or remodel such schemes, despite the acknowledged structuring felt in more conventional settings, where common usage rigidifies familiar patterns. See Lenn E. Goodman, In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach (Amherst: Humanity Press, 2001) 107–08; see also the case study I present in Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) 102–08.
2 James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Authorized and Revised Versions Including the American Variations; also Brief Dictionaries of the Hebrew and Greek Words of the Original, with References to the English Words (1894; repr. Nashville: Nelson, 1977), 441–63.
3 Yesh lo and ein lo are idiomatically translated as “he has” and “he has not,” as the words (too literally) say “there is to him” and “there is not to him.”
4 All translations of passages from the Bible are mine.
5 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, s.v. “del-,” 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000).
6 See Goodman, Lenn E., Creation and Evolution (London: Routledge, 2010), 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Plato, Symposium 189e–91e.
8 See, for example, Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 61a.
9 See Goodman, Lenn E., “Ibn Khaldūn and the Immanence of Judgment,” Philosophy East and West 63, no. 3 (2019): 737–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodman, Lenn E., Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 201–239 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Ibn Khaldūn quotes this line repeatedly in the Muqaddimah: Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1:173, 2:99, 134, 377.
11 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 58a; cf. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 9:5, where, as David notes, the prohibition is expanded to include one’s mother, father’s wife, a married woman, a maternal half-sister, another male, and a beast.
12 See Nemoy, Leon, “Two Controversial Points in the Karaite Law of Incest,” Hebrew Union College Annual 49 (1978), 247–65Google Scholar.
13 See Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, vol. 3, chap. 49, 3.116ab.
15 Readers of English will find the full text in Chavel, Charles, trans., Ramban (Nahmanides): Writings and Discourses, 2 vols. (New York: Shilo, 1978), 2.653–96.Google Scholar
16 My translation. See also Chavel, Charles, trans. Ramban (Nachmanides): Commentary on the Torah, 5 vols. (New York: Shilo, 1971–1976)Google Scholar.
17 Quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), book 1, chapter 2, at 156.