“Studying a practice: An inquiry into lapidation”

The question of why stoning (or lapidation) persists today continues to pose a puzzle.  It is not a puzzle that has gone unanswered.  Rejali looks at three common explanations for the origin and persistence of stoning: legal, religious, and cultural arguments. He concludes that all three ways of explaining lapidation involve precisely the same problematic understanding of the nature of practice. In summary, we failed to attribute the origin and persistence of lapidation to the law or Islam.  With respect to the persistence of lapidation, the theological texts offer a very thin foundation of lapidation as an Islamic punishment.  With respect to the origin, lapidation as a punishment for certain kinds of crimes pre-existed Islam in many disparate cultures including Jewish, pre-Arabian, and ancient Greek.  All this makes it difficult to think of the logic of lapidation being grounded in one religion or legal culture, particularly the Islamic.  Of course, Islamic authorities acted to justify and rationalize the pre-existing practice, but it is not entirely clear why they did so, or at least the logic is not obvious in the available texts.

Rejali suggests that perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.  We have been asking why lapidation exits in authoritative texts.  We are seeking to endow these words with causal force.  Perhaps what we really need to explain is not how the words caused the practice, but how the practice holds the words in place. He concludes that the logic of lapidation then can be understood in the context of a scopic regime that includes typical symbolic associations between stones, blindness, and vision as a medium for pollution, dogs, devils, and sexuality. He then goes on to explain how lapidation has its own “grammar” of explanation, and how elimination of the justifying texts will not necessarily undo the practice itself. The logic of this violence may be "in" the practice, and we are mistaken to go about searching for all the sorts of things outside the practice that might explain it. This suggests a strategy of not working from the outside in (that is from the law, religion, culture to the practice of violence) but from the logic of the practice out to legal theory, theology and anthropology.