Overcoming essentialisation: a comparative study of ‘living-together’ conceptions

Abstract

This paper compares two judgments of constitutional courts (French and German) assessing the constitutionality of statutes concerning veil-wearing and focuses on the underlying conceptions of ‘living together’. This means that what is actually compared is the self-understanding of the respective majority in the two societies as stated in the decisions. This is done by disassembling the concept of ‘living together’ into three elements: the notion of the individual, the meaning of belonging to the national community and the space accorded to religion in public. Each section of this paper examines one of these elements as they are entailed in the judgments and positions them critically within the respective legal cultural and historical contexts. The main aim of this paper is methodological in nature and is namely to show how comparative legal cultural studies can avoid essentialisation and rather highlight the complexity of every cultural context.

Everyday encounters with difference in urban parks: forging ‘openness to otherness’ in segmenting cities

“…Where conditions are conducive, the prevailing atmosphere plays a vital and distinctive role in constituting parks as safe, accessible and hospitable places for diverse users to co-mingle and interact in which ‘indifference to difference’ underpins an ‘openness to otherness’. In this Journal, Patrignani (2018, p. 374) has argued that the issue of ‘living together’ in territorially situated human interactions accompanied with basic shared values is both ‘a timely issue’ and one that ‘creates challenges for law’. She asserts: ‘Nowadays, living together needs to be renegotiated in a situation of plurality of cultural lifestyles.…”

“…She asserts: ‘Nowadays, living together needs to be renegotiated in a situation of plurality of cultural lifestyles. Taken-for-granted social norms, cultural forms of expression and of social conversance are confronted with alternatives whose alterity can fascinate, but also perturb’ (Patrignani, 2018, p. 374).…”