| This dissertation examines contemporary legal practice in an Indonesian district court located in the Kerinci Regency of Jambi Province, with particular attention paid to the interactive production of a legal reality, which is generated through the encounters between professional judges and local people. The topic is approached with an eye toward developing a perspective that while grounded in ethnographic detail will also be relevant to those interested in a critical examination of law, language, and culture. The most basic questions addressed center on who speaks, when, how and for what purposes during a trial. In asking these questions, a major premise includes the fact that form and content are not so readily divisible in that what one says is intricately tied to how one says it and that such considerations are intimately tied to questions of power and ideology. Linguistic practice and ideologies surrounding language are shown to create relevant social positionalities and provide for the expression of power in this cultural context.;Particular attention is focused on how local people come to interact with the criminal justice system and the challenges faced by both the judiciary and local people in dealing with what are often radically different understandings of "what is going on." Ultimately, the perspective that counts the most in determining what will happen is the one backed by the institutional power of the state, but the details of what occurs in an Indonesian criminal trial deserve a great deal more attention than they have received, for it is here, in the situated encounters between citizens and the coercive power of the state, that central questions about the very nature of this relationship come to be contested, resisted, and resolved. Fundamentally, this dissertation examines how these legal meanings and texts are generated through situated linguistic practice. The generation of cultural meaning through legal institutions is shown to be a complex and dynamic process whose importance transcends the particular facts of isolated cases. |
