The Russian Peasant and the Material World of His Judicial Power (the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century)

Abstract

The article undertakes an examination of the material space of legal court institutions in Russia of the Great Reforms period. The reconstruction of the legal court setting, investigation tools, crime and punishment instruments is important for studying one of the aspects of Russias legal culture of the later nineteenth century – namely, the system of its judicial power. With the help of a historicalethnographic reconstruction of the material world of that system, the author attempts to recreate an image of the legal court as perceived by a Russian peasant, and to show the ways in which peasants customary-law worldview and everyday practices interacted with the newly established offi cial judicial norms.