La Cina come caso di studio antropologico-giuridico

This paper, inspired by a recent conference of the anthropologist of law Norbert Rouland on human rights in the West and China, aims to focus the discipline of the anthropology of law through a specific case study, concerning the peculiarity of the Chinese cultural context, and discussing the theoretical premises in which the Chinese notion (Rén) that translates the Western idea of "human rights" has developed. The privileged method in this article focuses on the representative dimension of the two cultural spaces being compared, West and China, trying to emphasize the relevance of language in the construction of the structures of meaning that constitute each culture, of which the wording of the law is an essential part. The purpose of this analysis is to highlight and discuss the remarkable conceptual discontinuities between West and China, showing, below these differences, the ontological elements likely to be the true spaces of intersection between these two cultural worlds.