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1997 Utah L. Rev. 281 (1997)
Aftershocks: Exoticization, Normalization, and the Hermeneutic Compulsion

handle is hein.journals/utahlr1997 and id is 291 raw text is: Aftershocks: Exoticization, Normalization, and the Hermeneutic Compulsion Nathaniel Berman* The project of engaging in critical comparative inquiry today requires a strategic redeployment of familiar techniques. We must change the project of comparative law from a naive epistemological project (how best can we truly understand the Other?) to a critical and interventionist project (what critical resources exist both with- in one's 'own' frame of reference and within the 'Other's' that can be deployed for emancipatory purposes?). On one level, this change is required for epistemological reasons-we have come to criticize simplistic understandings of culture in general, and legal culture specifically, that informed earlier approaches. It is also required for ethical and political reasons-we have come to view the tone of liberal tolerance that charaterized earlier projects as, at best, moral- ly inadequate, and, at worst, deeply implicated in imperial manage- ment. Specifically, we need to reconsider three familiar comparative techniques: exoticization, normalization, and the hermeneutic com- pulsion. Critical comparativism requires strategic redeployment of these familiar techniques: in those contexts where the tradition would exoticize, normalize; in those contexts where it would normal- ize, exoticize; in those contexts where it finds infinite depths of meaning, formalize and fragment. Above all, refuse the homogeniz- ing and essentializing gestures of the tradition: instead, show how all cultural formations are split, hybrid, and embedded in contexts of power. These kinds of transformative strategies can restore the critical edge to a field living in the aftershocks of the traumas suf- fered by three familiar anchors of progressive critique: nationalism, assimilationism, and interpretivism. In this introductory Essay to the panel, I will discuss in turn the strategic redeployment of the conventional techniques associated with these three anchors: exoticization, normalization, and the hermeneutic compulsion. * Northeastern University School of Law.