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.
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