Death, unraveled

Date18 January 2008
Published date18 January 2008
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00407-3
Pages195-218
AuthorJesse Cheng
DEATH, UNRAVELED
Jesse Cheng
ABSTRACT
This chapter explores knowledge practices around the subject of capital
punishment. Capital sentencing jurisprudence and certain strands of
academic scholarship on the death penalty have certain resonances with
recent developments in reflexive cultural anthropology. Using the notion
of productive unraveling, this chapter seeks to reinforce relations between
these various knowledge practices by conceiving of them as situated on
the same ground, already interwoven with one another. This chapter
presents itself as both an example of and a call for the development of
interconnections between these various kinds of expert knowledges
concerning the death penalty.
INTRODUCTION
What is happening to thinking about the death penalty? I refer not to
the institutions that do the practical work of capital punishment – the
apprehending, the charging, the sentencing, and the executing. Rather,
I am concerned about the knowledge practices that shape the analytical
undertakings of both legal practitioners and academic commentators as they
attempt to make sense of the practice of state killings. How is knowledge
produced about the subject of capital punishment?
Special Issue: Is the Death Penalty Dying?
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 42, 195–218
Copyright r2008 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00407-3
195
In posing this question, I focus on two bodies of knowledge: the
‘‘practical’’ knowledge associated with the Supreme Court’s capital
sentencing jurisprudence, and the ‘‘scholarly’’ knowledge associated with
certain strands of academic analysis on the death penalty in general. A key
starting point of this chapter is that the simplistic dichotomy between
‘‘practice’’ and ‘‘scholarship,’’ ‘‘application’’ and ‘‘academics’’ – and the
privileging of the one over the other that the divide can imply – needs to be
unsettled in favor of a more realistic view of the intricately interconnected
nature of these various knowledge practices. Scholarly as well as practical
analysis about the death penalty has historically shaped, and been shaped
by, overlapping sets of moral, constitutional, and procedural considerations.
Rather than focus on the substance of these questions – the morality, the
constitutionality, and the procedure – I bring attention to the entwinements
between ‘‘scholarly’’ and ‘‘practical’’ knowledge practices that make these
questions intelligible in the first place.
I offer this as an instantiation of what the anthropologist Bill Maurer
calls the ‘‘lateralization’’ of different analytical practices (Maurer, 2005b).
The purpose of such an approach is ‘‘neither description as such, nor
explanation as such, but dense lateralizations with objects and subjects
that are already densely lateralized with each other and with the thing I
[the anthropologist] call me and my work’’ (Maurer, 2005b, p. 17). Thus,
this essay attempts not so much to offer a polished argument, but to sketch
out a few working thoughts that delve into, draw from, reach out to, and
thoroughly implicate themselves in traditional frames of analysis, even while
refusing to be contained by them. In other words, I develop this analysis
alongside my subjects, laterally, as opposed to ‘‘over’’ them, meta-
analytically. Instead of claiming a privileged position of analysis vis-a
`-vis
these other knowledges, this chapter attempts to puzzle things out with
them. It casts some lateral lines with the hope of suggesting how crosscutting
engagements that are already there provide opportunities for further
engagement.
This may seem like an unusual approach for those unfamiliar with current
developments in my own discipline of cultural anthropology, so I offer some
elaboration here. In certain areas of social-scientific inquiry, phenomena
have come to seem interesting – anthropologically and more generally –
because of a heightened sense of unpredictability that attends unexpected
and far flung connections, rapid change, and objects of analysis that refuse
to stand still (Greenhouse, Mertz, & Warren, 2002;Harvey, 2005;Holmes &
Marcus, 2005b;Tsing, 2005). The world appears ever more sophisticated
in its interdependence and unruliness. In response to this state of affairs,
JESSE CHENG196

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