Spectators to the Spectacle of Law: The Formation of a ‘Validating Public’ at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

ETHNOLOGY; COURTHOUSES; INTERNATIONAL Tribunal for Rwanda; SPEECHES, addresses, etc.

ARUSHA (Tanzania); TANZANIA

While the ethnography of contemporary courtrooms has been dominated by a concern with speech, this article considers how a silent, validating public is constructed within court complexes. Drawing on fieldwork at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha, Tanzania), I explore how the court's threshold practices form validating witnesses whose embodied deference contributes to the constitution of the courtroom as a space of privileged speech. I suggest, therefore, that court spectators are not incidental, but are integral to juridical spectacle and the authority of law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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