The Review

Calumet is an on-line pioneering review. It was formed with the goal of promoting interdisciplinary collaboration in the face of problems arising from intercultural relationships and their interweaving with legal experience. The premise and starting point of Calumet is the belief that even under the lens of law, people are not norms. More and more often, individuals from different cultures come into daily contact, interact, and arrange their own affairs. History and present intercultural relationships demonstrate, however, that the law inevitably crosses their paths. Normative structures are constantly looming in the background of their actions. The presence of law, perhaps silent at first, is nevertheless ready to burst forth at the first sign of possible conflict. At the same time, every contact between norms coming from different social or political circuits transmits interactions between cultural systems. Those intercultural intertwinings must be unveiled and eviscerated if we are to solve the problems ensuing from the overlap of differing legal contexts and traditions. In the contemporary world, people and norms, words and interests are continuously crossing borders, giving rise to new spaces for relating. The description and analysis of these new spaces calls for interdisciplinary tools. Drawing on their own cultural resources, each person has the possibility of modulating the interweaving between norms, power devices, and institutional structures. On the other hand, relying on the public influence of normative languages, the same people can foster translation and creative transactions between cultural systems. Just as in a pioneering experiment, human and social sciences and their respective scholars are all called upon to contribute to the unfolding of these processes of intercultural ‘creation’. From anthropology to semiotics, philosophy and aesthetics, history and geography, literature and psycho-social disciplines, up to medicine, ecology, religious studies and the analysis of relationships between religious traditions and secular institutions, each and every discipline should be empowered to coordinate with the study and intercultural use of law. The theoretical and pragmatic outcome of such cognitive and methodological convergence is the potential to sketch out traces for a human and legal subjectivity capable of supporting peaceful co-existence on both a local and global scale.
Our hope is that Calumet can become a meeting point that serves scholars from different disciplines pursuing these ends.