Anthropology and Law

An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technologyFrom legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.

Mark Goodale has written a comprehensive account that encompasses most of what legal anthropology has brought to the academic fore since the early 1990s. That in itself is an important achievement, because such an overview has not yet been given in the form of a book — and such books consolidate sub-disciplines in the eye of the academic community. But Mark Goodale has aspired for more than just a solid overview. His book is a plea for the relevance of the anthropological investigation of law not as an end in itself, but to enable the discipline to contribute — empirically grounded in the analysis of living legal pluralism — to a theory of the relationship of cosmopolitanism and the rule of law in globalized capitalism. As such, Goodale argues for an anthropology of law that is at the heart of the discipline. The fact that he argues his case well, makes this book an important read for anthropologists as well as for all those interested in the law., An updated introduction and overview of the field of legal anthropology is long overdue and Anthropology and Law will be welcome in many quarters. Goodale has done a service to the discipline and his volume is likely to become a classic text, required reading in a variety of courses, and a touchstone for years to come., By offering a personal account of the interdisciplinary nexus of anthropology and law, Goodale offers something more than an overview of a sub-discipline. He provides insight into (and through) a personal quest for knowledge, premised on breaking down the boundaries that regularly divide disciplines, realms of practice, and schools of thought. Goodale offers intellectual history, social theory, and politico-legal analysis in an accessible overview of a field that, in his hands, returns to the most ambitious questions of our time, the place of law in social development, political transition, protection of the dispossessed and marginalized, and, the ultimate anthropological question, how identity is shaped, how law influences who we are and how we belong., In Anthropology and Law, Mark Goodale elucidates how anthropology detaches the concept of law from its western moorings and takes a global perspective on the various ways that societies resolve disputes, enforce social norms, regulate power and authority and articulate ideas of the person. Goodales sparkling prose and brilliant analysis of the history and most recent developments in legal anthropology will appeal to experts and students alike., Mark Goodale uses a global palette to paint a vivid and accessible account of what contemporary anthropologists have to say about law as meaning, regulation and identity. If, as might be expected, his discussion of human and cultural rights is particularly convincing, the overall thesis of the path to legal cosmopolitanism and beyond is a stimulating contribution in its own right.

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne. Previously, he was Professor of Conflict Studies and Anthropology at George Mason University and the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. He is the author of Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009) and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008) and the editor or coeditor of eleven other volumes on anthropology, human rights, legal pluralism, justice, Latin American politics and society, and methodology. The founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights, he is currently writing a book about revolution, ideology, and law in Bolivia based on several years of ethnographic research funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University.