Of Minds and Bodies and the Legal-Spatial Constitution of Sanctuary

Abstract

Examination of the notion of sanctuary, whether invoked in reference to persecution, refugees, and asylum or as encountered in less extraordinary contexts as a function or fruit of privacy, offers insights into the pragmatics of fashioning connections between space, power, and experience. Seemingly built into the term are culturally significant conceptions of space. A sanctuary is, of course, a kind of place and what distinguishes it from other places is its central but anomalous relation to power. It is a space of protection, a zone of safety. It is a bounded space which, to the extent that it exists experientially, is the product of a certain sort of spatialization wherein the meaning of the line constituting sanctuary effects a protected inside, outside the normal circuits of power. The meaning of sanctuary follows from the meaning of the line. In this paper I examine episodes in the construction and revision—or, as my title suggests, the constitution and reconstitution—of sanctuary in the two seemingly disparate settings alluded to above: the relatively extraordinary setting of refugees fleeing persecution and the more or dinary settings suggested by conceptions of privacy. Juxtaposing these contexts draws our attention to the spatial (territorial) conditions of experience and the role of legal practices in shaping the spatial conditions of experience. In describing specific events, this study reveals something of the politics of spatial constitution. Contending interpretations of law result in divergent spatializations; read one way, the spaces of sanctuary are opened up, read another way they are closed off. In a given case one reading is authorized as the correct reading while others are dismissed. The study also reveals the ambiguity, indeterminacy, and instability of the legal categories that are used to constitute legal spaces, it therefore also reveals the ambiguity of social space and the experience of social space vis-a-vis power. 1 This ambiguity is most immediately seen in the circular reasoning that characterizes some of the cases. More fundamentally, though, it is rooted in the radical indeterminacy of the metaphysical

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.