Professor M Mundy, A507 and Mr R A Pottage, A358

The course is compulsory for MSc Law, Anthropology and Society. It is an option on MSc Human Rights, MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Social Anthropology and the LLM. MSc Regulation and other graduates can take this course at the discretion of those running it.

The course offers a foundation in those elements of anthropological and social theory essential to an understanding of law in society.

This course draws on anthropological themes and texts to develop an innovative perspective on contemporary legal norms and institutions. It aims to document legal institutions and practices as concrete ethnographic phenomena, focusing on the techniques of writing and documentation, the legal production of persons and things, and the legal framing of institutions. It combines abstract social theory with concrete ethnographic method in the study of ritual, kinship, property and communicative technologies in formal law. The course is structured about the following topics:

1. Law, anthropology, and the production of the social: an introduction to the links between legal and anthropological scholarship, exploring juridical concepts of power, agency and social personality and anthropology’s models of society;
2. Legal and political ritual: selected theoretical analyses of modern legal ritual examined against the background of anthropological debates concerning the general nature of ritual;
3. The communication of power in writing: the representation and construction of social institutions in administration;
4. Legal time and evidence: ethnographic analysis of narrative, evidence and proof in different legal cultures;
5. Persons and things: legal forms of personification and objectification in systems of ownership and inheritance, with particular attention to the law governing reproductive resources;
6. Legal collectivities, the modern corporation and its others: ethnographies of the social and legal construction of collective agency;
7. The uses of anthropology in law and politics: the role of anthropology in contemporary contests over indigenous title, cultural property, common property resources, and alternative dispute resolution.

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995; Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence, 1986 and Ritual, History and Power, 1989; Janet Dolgin, Defining the Family. Law, Technology, and Reproduction in an Uneasy Age, 1997; Kaja Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics. Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier, 2000; Rebecca French, The Golden Yoke: The Cosmology of Law in Buddhist Tibet, 1995; C M Hann (Ed), Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition, 1998; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1995; Pierre Legendre, Law and the Unconscious. A Legendre Reader, 1997; Niklas Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State, 1990 and Observations on Modernity, 1998; Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans, 1990; Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, 1993; Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts & Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980, 1986; Henrietta Moore, A Passion for Difference, 1994; Martha Mundy (Ed), Law and Anthropology, 2002; W T Murphy, The Oldest Social Science?, 1997; Laura Nader & Harry F Todd Jr (Eds), The Disputing Process – Law in Ten Societies, 1978; Katherine S Newman, Law & Economic Organization: A Comparative Study of Preindustrial Societies, 1983; Leopold Pospisil, Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory, 1971; Roy Rapapport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 1999; Simon Roberts & John Comaroff, Rules & Processes, 1983; Simon Roberts, Order and Dispute, 1973; June Starr & Jane F Collier (Eds), History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, 1989; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition, 1995; Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance & Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things, 1999; Gunther Teubner (Ed), Global Law Without a State, 1997; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969; Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping While Giving, 1992; Barbara Yngvesson, Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and complaint in a New England court, 1993.

A three-hour examination in the ST worth 80%.  One essay (4,000 words) worth 20%.