The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives(The Cultural Lives of Law)

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "culturalives" - past and present - of the state's ultimate sanction. They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively - examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea - arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition.

Table of Contents:
Contents Contributors 000 1. Putting Culture into the Picture: Toward a Comparative Analysis of State Killing 000 Christian Boulanger and Austin Sarat Part I: Civilization and Punishment: Self and Other in Europe and the Americas 2. Nineteenth-Century Executions as Performances of Law, Death, and Civilization 000 Jurgen Martschukat 3. Seed of Abolition: Experience and Culture in the Desire to End Capital Punishment in Mexico, 1841-1857 000 Patrick Timmons 4. The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment in the United States 000 Judith Randle 5. European Identity and the Mission Against the Death Penalty in the United States 000 Evi Girling 6. Crime and Punishment/Self versus Other: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment Comparative Perspective of European and American Film 000 Louise Tyler 7. Capital Punishment in Poland: An Aspect of the "Cultural Life" of the Death Penalty Discourse 000 Agata Fijalkowski Part II: State Killing and State Violence in Central and South Asia and the Middle East 8. Capital Punishment in Kyrgyzstan: Between the Past, "Other" State Killings and Social Demands 000 Botagoz Kassymbekova 9. Death and the Nation: State Killing in India 000 Julia Eckert 10. Imagining the Death Penalty in Israel: Punishment, Violence, Vengeance, and Revenge 000 Shai J. Lavi 11. The Palestinian Culture of Death: Shariah and Siyasah: Justice, Political Power, and Capital Punishment in the Palestinian National Authority 000 Judith Mendelsohn Rood Part III: Paternal States, "Asian Values," and Visions of Social Order: Capital Punishment in East and Southeast Asia 12. Saving State Face: Capital Punishment in Japan 000 David T. Johnson 13. What Is Wrong with Capital Punishment? Official and Unofficial Attitudes Toward Capital Punishment in Modern and Contemporary China 000 Virgil K. Y. Ho 14. Capital Punishment and the Culture of Developmentalism in Singapore 000 Alfred Oehlers and Nicole Tarulevicz 15. Ending State Killing in South Korea: Challenging the Asian Capital Punishment Status Quo 000 Sangmin Bae Index

About the Author :
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. He is co-author, with Stuart Scheingold, of Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering (Stanford University Press, 2004). Christian Boulanger is Lecturer at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Free University, Berlin.

Review :
"In fifteen chapters, they [Sarat and Boulanger] take the reader on a capital punishment odyssey through not only the US, but also central and south Asia, the Middle East, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. In a nutshell, this is a book well worth reading for those interested in exploring cross-cultural treatments of the death penalty." - CHOICE