ABSTRACT
As the situations of the Derungs, Pregelj, the Roma travelers, and the Chagossians demonstrate, the where of social power clearly matters to the how and why of social power. The situations with which the last chapter ended each “took place” in specific locations that had been nomically encoded and constituted as legal spaces. As we also saw, the clusters of legal meanings associated with those particular locations were, to some extent, ambiguous, or at least amenable to various interpretations and arguments. This contributed to the ambiguity of the situations themselves and to uncertainties as to the operations of power. This chapter offers another point of ingress for nomospheric investigations, the exploration of nomic settings. My tasks here are to stipulate and illustrate this basic nomospheric notion. I will begin by sketching some of the characteristics of nomic settings and then focus on the notion of nomic traces. These are the discursive, signifying bits that constitute sites as nomic settings and which are available for actors, to be taken up either in the immediate unfolding of situations or retrodictively in “cases” concerning disturbing situations. We will also examine a particularly important sort of tracing involving the production of nomic figures or abstract categories of human actors defined by their relation to legal space. We will illustrate some of the general themes of this chapter through more extensive investigation of two of the more fundamental nomic settings associated with the constitution of everyday life: “home” and “public space.”
