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Belonging and Identity: Past and Present - Discussed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108499682.

In memory of Professor Ruth Gavison (1945–2020)

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Discussed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108499682.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2022

Joseph E. David
Joseph E. David*
Affiliation:
Professor of Law, Sapir Academic College
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Abstract

Like many others, I believe that the information revolution is a constitutive moment in human history, and not only because of the development of technologies that change our habits and improve the quality of our lives. More than anything else, it is because the information revolution profoundly and dramatically changes our self-concept. That revolution is changing our understanding of the place we occupy in the universe (the erosion of anthropocentrism), forcing us to rethink our uniqueness as human beings and our human essence. I believe that the preconditions of our existence are changing dramatically nowadays, and consequently, our notions of belonging and identity require revision.

Keywords

jurisdictionidentitybelongingvulnerabilityhuman dignityterritorialityinformation revolutiondata-driven technologyprofileprivacy
Type
Book Review Symposium on Kinship, Law, and Politics
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 391 - 398
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

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References

1 I suspect that I was misunderstood by Mermelstein, who consistently attributed to me a perception that belonging is a “private matter” or one that is “private and internal.” I have nowhere linked privacy and belonging, and in no way do I think that this is so. We disagree on the intrinsicality of emotion to the concepts of belonging and identity. The emotional perception of belonging and identity is interesting and thought-provoking, but I am not sure that an emotionally based definition of belonging would not confuse a sense of belonging with belonging as such. (Are justice and a sense of justice identical or overlapping concepts?) In any event, defining belonging as “emotional attachment” limits its relevance to human beings and excludes entities that do not have emotions. See Mermelstein, Ari, “Between Belonging and Identity in Ancient Judaism: The Role of Emotion in the Production of Identity,” Journal of Law and Religion 37, no. 2 (2022)Google Scholar (this issue).

2 Genesis 2:18 (my translation).

3 Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations, trans. and ed. Waterfield, Robin (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 4:3 Google Scholar, at 89 (“People try to find retreats for themselves …. A marked longing for such a haven has been a habit of yours too…. So never stop allowing yourself to retreat there and be renewed.”).

4 See Arendt, Hannah, “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 22–78 Google Scholar.

5 See Koops, Bert-Jaap et al., “A Typology of Privacy,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 38, no. 2 (2017): 483–576 Google Scholar; Richards, Neil, Why Privacy Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Capurro, Rafael, “Privacy: An Intercultural Perspective,” Ethics and Information Technology 7, no. 1 (2005): 37–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hongladarom, Soraj, A Buddhist Theory of Privacy (Singapore: Springer, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Jill Lepore, “Privacy in an Age of Publicity,” New Yorker, June 17, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-prism.

8 See Whitman, James Q., “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” Yale Law Journal 113, no. 6 (2003–2004): 1151–1222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Goodman, Lenn E., “Belonging, Identity, and Identification,” Journal of Law and Religion 37, no. 2 (2022)Google Scholar (this issue).

10 See Ingrid Robeyns and Morten Fibieger Byskov, “The Capability Approach,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/capability-approach.

11 See Goodman, “Belonging, Identity, Identification.”

12 The difference between the capability-based and the vulnerability-based approach largely reflects the phenomenological difference between positive liberty and negative liberty, both of which play an important role in theories of the value of privacy.

13 See Nussbaum, Martha C., Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Barilan, Y. Michael, “From Imago Dei in the Jewish–Christian Traditions to Human Dignity in Contemporary Jewish Law,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 19, no. 3 (2009): 231–59CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

15 Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology focuses on the capable human being, or the capable self: homo capax. According to this view, the human being is not only a victim, but also capable of developing actions. See Gregor, Brian, Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion: Rebirth of the Capable Self (New York: Lexington Books, 2019)Google Scholar.

16 On Nahmanides’s motives to immigrate to the Land of Israel, see Kayserling, M., “The Jews of Spain,” review of An Inquiry into the Sources of the History of the Jews in Spain , by Jacobs, Joseph, Jewish Quarterly Review 8, no. 3 (1896): 486–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Ford, Richard T., “Law’s Territory (A History of Jurisdiction),” Michigan Law Review 97, no. 4 (1999): 843–930 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 “[T]erritorial jurisdictions … are relatively new and intuitively surprising technological developments. New, because until the development of modern cartography, legal authority generally followed relationships of status rather than those of autochthony.” Ford, “Law’s Territory,” 843.

19 “This history calls into doubt the common intuition that territorial jurisdiction is a timeless feature or foundation of government. Instead, jurisdiction was invented at a specific historical moment and deployed to advance certain identifiable projects. Jurisdiction transformed both the way government operated and, ultimately, the structure of government itself.” Ford, “Law’s Territory,” 846.

20 Another view sees this development as the marginalization qua privatization of group-based jurisdiction and law. See Asad, Talal, “Reconfiguration of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt,” in Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 205–56Google Scholar.

21 Fukuyama, Francis, “Expressive Individualism,” in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), 48–54 Google Scholar.

22 On one hand, the Israeli Declaration of Independence states a territorial jurisprudence that ignores group-based identities: “The State of Israel … will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” “Declaration of Independence,” Official Gazette 1 (May 14, 1948): 1, https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/About/Pages/Declaration.aspx. On the other hand, various fundamental laws, such as the Law of Return (1950) and the Nation-State Law (2018), prioritize the group-based identity of Jewishness.

23 The term infosphere was first coined by Kenneth Boulding in 1970 and was redefined by Luciano Floridi in 1999 to denote the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities (including informational agents) and their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. See Van der Veer Martens, Betsy, “An Illustrated Introduction to the Infosphere,” Library Trends 63, no. 3 (2015): 317–61, esp. 332–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 The term onlife was coined by Mireille Hildebrandt to denote the hybrid life world composed of and constituted by combinations of software and hardware that determine information flows and the capability to perceive and cognize one’s environment. Hildebrandt, Mireille, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 8.

25 For analysis of this distinction and its operation, see the seminal work of Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

26 Consider the case of a hybrid ethnic identity emerging from DNA tests: Antonia Noori Farzan, “A DNA Test Said a Man Was 4% Black. Now He Wants to Qualify as a Minority Business Owner,” Washington Post, September 25, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/25/a-dna-test-said-he-was-4-black-now-he-wants-to-qualify-as-a-minority-business-owner/.

27 See, for example, Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019)Google Scholar; Véliz, Carissa, Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data (London: Bantam Press, 2020)Google Scholar.