Anthropology And Law

Legal practice renders a further important benefit to anthropology when it validates anthropological knowledge through the use of anthropologists as expert witnesses in the courtroom and the introduction of the 'culture defense' against criminal charges."--Jacket.

An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technology From legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology is a ground-breaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. The structure of the Handbook is animated by an overarching collective narrative about how law and anthropology have and should relate to each other as intersecting domains of inquiry that address such fundamental questions as dispute resolution, normative ordering, social organization, and legal, political, and social identity. The need for such a comprehensive project has become even more pressing as lawyers and anthropologists work together in an ever-increasing number of areas, including immigration and asylum processes, international justice forums, cultural heritage certification and monitoring, and the writing of new national constitutions, among many others. The Handbook takes critical stock of these various points of intersection in order to identify and conceptualize the most promising areas of innovation and sociolegal relevance, as well as to acknowledge the points of tension, open questions, and areas for future development.

The topical chapters in this cutting-edge collection at the intersection of comparative law and anthropology explore the mutually enriching insights and outlooks of the two fields. Comparative Law and Anthropology adopts a foundational approach to social and cultural issues and their resolution, rather than relying on unified paradigms of research or unified objects of study. Taken together, the contributions extend long-developing trends from legal anthropology to an anthropology of law and from externally imposed to internally generated interpretations of norms and processes of legal significance within particular cultures. The book's expansive conceptualization of comparative law encompasses not only its traditional geographical orientation, but also historical and jurisprudential dimensions. It is also noteworthy in blending the expertise of long-established, acclaimed scholars with new voices from a range of disciplines and backgrounds.

"Questions about the nature of law, its relationship with custom, and the form of legal rules, categories and claims, are placed at the centre of this challenging, yet accessible, introduction. Anthropology of law is presented as a distinctive subject within the broader field of legal anthropology, suggesting new avenues of inquiry for the anthropologist, while also bringing empirical studies within the ambit of legal scholarship.

Legal Anthropology: An Introduction offers an initial overview of the challenging debates surrounding the cross-cultural analysis of legal systems. Equal parts review and criticism, James M. Donovan outlines the historical landmarks in the development of the discipline, identifying both strengths and weaknesses of each stage and contribution. Legal Anthropology suggests that future progress can be made by looking at the perceived fairness of social regulation, rather than sanction or dispute resolution as the distinguishing feature of law.

Building on earlier work in the anthropology of law and taking a critical stance toward it, June Starr and Jane F. Collier ask, "Should social anthropologists continue to isolate the ‘legal’ as a separate field of study?" To answer this question, they confront critics of legal anthropology who suggest that the subfield is dying and advocate a reintegration of legal anthropology into a renewed general anthropology. Chapters by anthropologists, sociologists, and law professors, using anthropological rather than legal methodologies, provide original analyses of particular legal developments. Some contributors adopt an interpretative approach, focusing on law as a system of meaning; others adopt a materialistic approach, analyzing the economic and political forces that historically shaped relations between social groups. Contributors include Said Armir Arjomand, Anton Blok, Bernard Cohn, George Collier, Carol Greenhouse, Sally Falk Moore, Laura Nader, June Nash, Lawrence Rosen, June Starr, and Joan Vincent.

This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.