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Legalism - Anthropology and History (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,295
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Legalism - Anthropology and History (Hardcover)
Series: Legalism
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Law and law-like institutions are visible in human societies very
distant from each other in time and space. When it comes to
observing and analysing such social constructs historians,
anthropologists, and lawyers run into notorious difficulties in how
to conceptualize them. Do they conform to a single category of
'law'? How are divergent understandings of the nature and purpose
of law to be described and explained? Such questions reach to the
heart of philosophical attempts to understand the nature of law,
but arise whenever we are confronted by law-like practices and
concepts in societies not our own. In this volume leading
historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to
analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. They
start from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist
Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with
jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and
rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's
lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it
can colour equally both 'simple' and 'complex' law. Breaking with
recent emphases on 'practice', nine specialist contributors
explore, in a wide-ranging set of cases, the place of legalism in
the workings of social life. The essays make obvious the need to
question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at
other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic
governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a 'central
case'. Legalism may be 'aspirational', connecting people to wider
visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights;
and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century
Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as
consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not
reduce to simple questions of power. The cases explored range from
ancient Asia Minor to classical India, and from medieval England
and France to Saharan oases and southern Arabia. In each case they
assume no knowledge of the society or legal system discussed. The
volume will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists with
an interest in law, but to students of law engaged in legal theory,
for the light it sheds on the strengths and limitations of abstract
legal philosophy.
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