Property As Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends (original) (raw)
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Property: Anthropological Aspects
The concept of property has been deployed in such specific ways in Western political philosophy, law, and economics that some anthropologists question its usefulness for comparative analysis. This article argues for its retention and the continued investigation of both 'real' and intangible property relations. Anthropological approaches challenge abstract models by exploring the sociocultural contexts in which property objects are held and exchanged, including the ways in which legal rights mesh with relations of power. In the era of neoliberal capitalism, anthropologists also need to reengage with world history and connect the specific claims of property to wider frameworks of citizenship.
Legal Anthropology, syllabus, Emilio Dabed, Al Quds Bard College, 2014
Theoretical approaches and methodological choices in the anthropological study of the “legal” share the assumption that normative phenomena and, more specifically, law is a social product, carrying the traces of the context in which they are produced. In this sense, norms/law can be understood as “metaphoric representation” of their social and political context. At the same time, anthropological legal research has looked abundantly at the ways in which law participates in the creation of social reality. In assessing the “performative” impact of juridical phenomena, or what Bourdieu refers to as the “power of law”, an analysis of the relation between legal processes, discursive practice and political and social changes is imperative. The central argument is, thus, that juridical phenomena “not only reflect but also produce and reinforce social processes”.
The Anthropology of Legal Form: Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Transnational Law
Law and Social Inquiry-journal of The American Bar Foundation, 2023
For most of legal anthropology's existence as a distinct subfield, ethnographers have studied the function of law rather than its form. With the proliferation of neoliberal technologies of governance, however, anthropologists are increasingly turning to law's form. This article surveys the anthropology of legal form and its contribution to the study of transnational law and governance. In taking legal form as the object of ethnographic inquiry, legal anthropologists examine the material, sensory, and symbolic dimensions through which law is recognized. Such an approach analyzes how power operates not through law's substantive meanings but, rather, through its aesthetic dimensions. Current anthropological scholarship has illuminated the diverse ways in which the technical and formal aesthetics of law operate to foreclose political contestation. I argue, however, that the aesthetics of legal form may also be mobilized to render power relations visible and open to challenge amidst proliferating forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within one arena of global governance-the UN Committee on World Food Security-I illustrate how activists draw on the aesthetics of rights to illuminate inequalities and politicize governance processes. In doing so, I suggest that greater engagement with Jacques Rancière's political theory of aesthetics can deepen anthropological insights into the power of legal form in the context of transnational law and governance.
In his book Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction, Mark Goodale gives a concise overview on the contemporary anthropology of law. In Goodale’s narrative, the recent history of legal anthropology emerged with the end of the Cold War, “at a historical moment—fleeting as it turned out to be—when the Kantian ‘sweet dream’ of perpetual peace was being grounded in a cosmopolitan legal imaginary to an extraordinary degree” (200). This liminal moment started developments such as “the juridification of politics, identity (such as indigenous rights), and social organization, at the same time in which global inequality was growing steadily” (211). From this time on, anthropologists began to be interested, much more than before, in international legal orders and transnational legal pluralism. Goodale aims at presenting many of the fruits of over 25 years of such investigations.
USW - LLB Assignment Paper, 2010
“Primitive, tribal societies appear…to lack ‘law’ in the form that it exists in so-called advanced societies. The apparent absence of the institutions that we normally associate with legal systems – courts, law enforcement authorities, prisons, legal codes – [has] led to the conclusion that these communities were governed by custom rather than law.” (Understanding Jurisprudence R Wacks 2nd Edition [2009], p.244) To accept the statement acephalous societies lack law in the form that exists within an institutionalised state society one has to draw a conclusion from not only the divergence between custom and law but also several competing schools of thought within the field of anthropology. This paper will examine briefly the importance of legal anthropology when applying a cross-cultural approach to find a universal definition against the ethnocentricity of one-system-fits-all, the concept of social mobility, and different validations of law and laws as rules. A critical evaluation will be drawn of the variance between function as opposed to form of a custom, customary law and law itself. Further examination will consider, by probing different anthropological viewpoints, if reciprocal economic obligation as a method of internalised self-regulation is an important mechanism to a stateless society as a norm of compromise as opposed to the external regulation of force. Deducing from the evidence, concluding remarks will consider the statement that face-to-face communities were governed by custom rather than law as either an affirmative or negative. by Carl Taylor