Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949-1999 [*]
TLDR
This paper reviewed the broadening scope of anthropological studies of law between 1949 and 1999, and considered how the political background of the period may be reflected in anglophone academic perspectives.Abstract:
This article reviews the broadening scope of anthropological studies of law between 1949 and 1999, and considers how the political background of the period may be reflected in anglophone academic perspectives. At the mid-century, the legal ideas and practices of non-Western peoples, especially their modes of dispute management, were studied in the context of colonial rule. Two major schools of thought emerged and endured. One regarded cultural concepts as central in the interpretation of law. The other was more concerned with the political and economic milieu, and with self-serving activity. Studies of law in non-Western communities continued, but from the 1960s and 1970s a new stream turned to issues of class and domination in Western legal institutions. An analytic advance occurred when attention turned to the fact that the state was not the only source of obligatory norms, but coexisted with many other sites where norms were generated and social control exerted. This heterogeneous phenomenon came to be called ‘legal pluralism’. The work of the half-century has culminated in broadly conceived, politically engaged studies that address human rights, the requisites of democracy, and the obstacles to its realization.read more
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References
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Outline of a Theory of Practice
TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood.
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TL;DR: Pierre Bourdieu develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood, able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world.
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TL;DR: In this article, Fields has given us a splendid new translation of the greatest work of sociology ever written, one we will not be embarrassed to assign to our students, in addition she has written a brilliant and profound introduction.
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TL;DR: In this paper, Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought, Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination, and From the Natives Point of View: on the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.
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TL;DR: In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim set himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity as discussed by the authors, and investigated what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia.