Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social

Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social PDF Author: Alain Pottage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521539456
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social

Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social PDF Author: Alain Pottage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521539456
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book

Book Description
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.

History and Power in the Study of Law

History and Power in the Study of Law PDF Author: June Starr
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
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.

The Anthropology of Law

The Anthropology of Law PDF Author: Fernanda Pirie
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191650668
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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. The Anthropology of Law considers contemporary debates on human rights, international laws, and new forms of property alongside ethnographic studies of order and conflict resolution. It also delves into the rich corpus of texts and codes studied by legal historians, classicists and orientalists: the great legal systems of ancient China, India, and the Islamic world, unjustly neglected by anthropologists, are examined alongside forms of law created on their peripheries. Ancient codes, medieval coutumes, village constitutions, and tribal laws provide rich empirical detail for the authors analysis of the cross-cultural importance of the form of law, as text or rule, and carefully-selected examples shed new light upon the interrelations and distinctions between laws, custom, and justice. Legalism is taken as the starting point for inquiry into the nature and functions of law, and its roles as an instrument of government, a subject of scholarship, and an assertion of moral order. An argument unfolds concerning the tensions between legalistic thought and argument, and the ideological or aspirational claims to embody justice, morality, and religious truth, which lie at the heart of what we think of as law.

Law and Anthropology

Law and Anthropology PDF Author: Wolfgang Fikentscher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783848713196
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description


The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology PDF Author: Marie-Claire Foblets
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192577018
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 993

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Book Description
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.

Spaces of Law and Custom

Spaces of Law and Custom PDF Author: Edoardo Frezet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000406458
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts. Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship. As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists.

Law and Anthropology

Law and Anthropology PDF Author: Martha Mundy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This volume provides an introduction to the major themes and theoretical perspectives of contemporary work in Law and Anthropology. It reflects both important recent ethnography of law and the state, and the dialogue of jurists and anthropologists concerning legal institutions in the present era of economic globalization and renewed civil and international conflict.

Anthropology & Law

Anthropology & Law PDF Author: James M. Donovan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571814234
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

Legal Anthropology

Legal Anthropology PDF Author: James M. Donovan
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759109834
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
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.

A Sociology of Constitutions

A Sociology of Constitutions PDF Author: Chris Thornhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495801
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Using a methodology that both analyzes particular constitutional texts and theories and reconstructs their historical evolution, Chris Thornhill examines the social role and legitimating status of constitutions from the first quasi-constitutional documents of medieval Europe, through the classical period of revolutionary constitutionalism, to recent processes of constitutional transition. A Sociology of Constitutions explores the reasons why modern societies require constitutions and constitutional norms and presents a distinctive socio-normative analysis of the constitutional preconditions of political legitimacy.