Law and AnthropologyCourse Introduction

by Martin Ramstedt Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

International Master’s in Sociology of LawOñati, 23 November-4 December 2015

Why “Law & Anthropology” in a Sociology of Law Programme?

More general reasons:• Anthropologists & sociologists lay claim to the same

founding fathers, e.g.:– Emile Durkheim– Herbert Spencer– Max Weber

• Under the condition of globalization, the dis-tinction between urban and rural communities has become blurred

• Anthropologists and sociologists nowadays en-gage very similar research questions in the same social fields

Why “Law & Anthropology” in a Sociology of Law Programme?

More specifically A number of global trends have boosted the emergence of “Law & Anthropology” in the wider acade-mic field of “law & society, for instance:

• The cultural turn in law due to global migration• Increasing juridification of the lifeworld (as Jürgen Haber-mas has

put it)• The increasing transplantation of legal concepts, norms and

institutions in the context of accelerated globaliza-tion• Increasing accommodation of religious and ethnic norma-tivities

in the laws of the land• The increasing convergence of the human rights and indi-genous

rights discourses

Introduction of the following general notions

• Law plays an important role in individual and collective identity formation

• Disputes are diagnostic events, they constitute important open-ings into the socio-cultural, political and economic fabric of a gi-ven community or society

• Law co-exists, thrives on and conflicts with the norms of other “semi-autonomous social fields” (business, familial relations, reli-gion, custom, etc.)

• “Law” is not only “black letter law” but comes with a certain culture (cosmology, performativity, and institutional framework)

• The notion of “law” as “state law” can be contested; non-state normative orders may also be called “law”, given the family re-semblance between them and state law

General structure of the course

• In the first week, our attention is mainly focused on conceptual issues, like The changing notion and role of “law” in the glo-

balized world?What constitutes a “dispute”, “conflict resolution”,

or “justice” is culturally inflectedLegal vs. normative pluralism and its corollary,

inter-legality Juridification as a motor of legal pluralism, which in

turn is accelerated by the entitlement discourses and right claims of the diverse social movements

General structure of the course

• In the second week, we zoom in on more concrete empirical issues, like

The transformation of “tradition” in the transna-tional indigenous rights movement (particular reference to ILO Convention No. 169 from 1989 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from 2007)

The accommodation of religion by the law of the land. Here we stress the point that “freedom of reli-gion” hinges on the respective legal definition of “re-ligion”

The ethnography of legal implementation pro-cesses in the context of development aid, where we are confronted with a particular kind of legal transplants called “project law”

The vernacularization of human rights

And the tensions between human rights and the interventions of the Bretton Wood institutions, especially the World Bank

Teaching style• The choice of reading and additional material entails explicit

attention to the background of the respective authors and their positioning in a particular field of academic discourse

• The readings are presented in conjunction with refe-rence to certain points of attention and in relation with specific questions

• In class, lively and “to-the-point” engagement in the discussions is seen as partial fulfilment of credit (20% participation / 80% essay)

• Coming on time will be positively refleted in the final grade• Contemporary issues are always presented in a histo-rical as

well as comparative perspective