Beheading live chickens, politicians taking oaths of innocence when accused of wrongdoing, or police calling on a deity to help crack tough cases are among the judicial rituals that Paul Katz, a Research Fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History, will discuss in a lecture that he will deliver tomorrow.
The lecture, Rite Makes Right — Judicial Rituals in Postwar Taiwan, is being held as part of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s (龍應台文化基金會) Taipei Salon (台北沙龍) lecture series and will be moderated by Nap Yin Lau (柳立言), also a Research Fellow at Academia Sinica.
“The fascinating thing is that people are still doing these things today — and not just taxi drivers or truck drivers, but professors and chairmen of the board of companies that are involved, for example, in copyright disputes, and prosecutors too,” Katz said.
Photo Courtesy of Paul Katz
Katz says that there are three judicial systems in Taiwan that work in tandem, a phenomenon he has dubbed the “judicial continuum.”
The first involves private mediation — an extra-legal process whereby two respected uncles in a large family, for example, come together to resolve a dispute.
“Then there is the official court system which was often, and still is in many cases, the route of last resort [because] judges are not often reliable [or] they are corrupt. Even today there are controversies about judges judging too lightly or taking bribes,” Katz said.
The third system within Katz’ classification involves popular religion, whereby people invoke underworld courts or visit temples and file indictments or behead chickens as oaths
of innocence.
“These three systems work in a continuum. They work together. They are not mutually exclusive. So it calls into question the rather narrow definition of law and legal history that prevails in the field today based on the Western secular humanist perspective, which never really held in China anyway,” he said.
Katz has published numerous articles and books on popular religion, including most recently When Valleys Turned Blood Red: The Ta-pa-ni Incident in Colonial Taiwan (2006) and Divine Justice — Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (2009).
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