Exploring new avenues for studying the legal culture : drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theorization of "Culture"

The chapter begins from the observation of the resurrection of the concept of culture both in biological sciences and social sciences. It argues that legal academia should not ignore these processes that calls for rethinking the idea of legal culture. In this vein, the present chapter aims at identifying the conditions in which the concept of legal culture could be reconceptualized and expanded in a way that extends our understanding of law as a dynamic, embedded, ontologically complex phenomenon. For this purpose, the previous dominant discourse on and main definitions of legal culture are reconstructed and critically examined. The lack of solid theoretical grounds for most of the popular conceptualizations of legal culture constitutes the most striking features of the current discourse on this subject. As a response to this problem, Homi Bhabha’s insights on “culture” will be employed in reworking the concept of legal culture. This aim is directed by the need for grounding the use of legal culture in the approach of capturing “culture”, which has vast theoretical potential. The chapter intends to stretch the theoretical possibilities of Bhabha’s insights, as applied to thinking about legal cultur