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Legal Anthropology

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Jun 16th, 2016
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  1. Introduction
  2. Legal practices, processes, and claims are among the most powerful forces that shape our lives. Legal anthropology has historically tried to understand the relationship between legal processes and other aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political life as well as the meanings and implications of legal practices on their own terms. It is arguable that, at its 19th-century origins, anthropology was the product of legal concerns, as scholars tried to understand what made 19th-century Europe and North America seemingly so different from other times and other places. For many of these scholars, law was a key point of difference. Yet, much anthropology in the 20th century implicitly challenged such rigid and implicitly evolutionary distinctions. In particular, anthropologists tried to show how other cultures had “lawlike” institutions that were as complex and reasonable as those of Western law. In the mid-20th century, in the search for lawlike processes, anthropology settled on disputes as the basic unit of comparison. This move saw a relative decline in wider interest in legal anthropology, as the analysis tended to produce endless studies of small-scale decision making. In the late 1980s, however, a general resurgence in legal anthropology occurred. This was marked, in large measure, by a shift from studying processes that seemed lawlike to a focus on self-consciously legal procedures. That shift can broadly be understand as a move from legal anthropology to the anthropology of law, in which the object of study is those institutions, processes, and concepts that have their roots in (but are not limited to) “Western liberal law.” Anthropologists have therefore increasingly turned their attention to issues such as human rights, property, and citizenship. This, of course, has not ruled out the analysis of alternative legal orders—for example, what is taken to be Islamic law—but these are not usually studied as isolated cultural processes.
  3. Overviews
  4. There is a general lack of up-to-date overviews, but there are a number of works that can serve as introductions to the history of legal anthropology and its concerns. Fuller 1994, Moore 2001, and Just 1992 are good review essays, yet are all becoming outdated. Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994 andStarr and Collier 1989 are two useful collections of essays that demonstrate the renewed interest in legal anthropology that came about in the late 1980s; in particular, they show the importance of an appreciation of power relations in the analysis of legal processes. Mundy 2002 and Moore 2005 are comprehensive readers, with the former focusing on more recent essays, and the latter giving a historical overview.
  5. Review Essays
  6. There are a number of useful review essays tracing the history of legal anthropology (Fuller 1994,Just 1992, Moore 2001, Snyder 1981). However, these works do not reflect more recent developments in the field, such as interest in property, citizenship, human rights, and violence and must be read in this light.
  7. Fuller, Chris. 1994. Legal anthropology, legal pluralism and legal thought. Anthropology Today 10.3: 9–12.
  8. DOI: 10.2307/2783478Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  9. A short and punchy, although somewhat pessimistic, review of where legal anthropology has come from and where it might be going. Available online through purchase.
  10. Find this resource:
  11. Just, Peter. 1992. History, power, ideology, and culture: Current directions in the anthropology of law. Law and Society Review 26.2: 373–412.
  12. DOI: 10.2307/3053902Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  13. A useful review article, yet now somewhat dated. Available online through purchase.
  14. Find this resource:
  15. Moore, Sally Falk. 2001. Certainties undone: Fifty turbulent years of legal anthropology, 1949–1999. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7.1: 95–116.
  16. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.00052Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  17. A very useful overview of the history of the subdiscipline from one of the leading figures in the field. Moore trained as a lawyer and worked as a staff attorney during the Nuremburg Tribunal prosecution of Nazi war criminals before becoming an anthropologist. Available online through purchase.
  18. Find this resource:
  19. Snyder, Francis G. 1981. Anthropology, dispute processes and law: A critical introduction.British Journal of Law and Society 8.2: 141–180.
  20. DOI: 10.2307/1409719Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  21. A critical analysis of anthropological approaches to law and disputes. Available online through purchase.
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  23. General Accounts
  24. The four pieces in this section represent general arguments about how anthropologists should analyze legal processes. Geertz 1983 is written by an anthropologist; Donovan 2007, by a lawyer and anthropologist; Moore 1978, by an anthropologist who trained and worked as a lawyer; andRoberts 1979, by a lawyer, although it will become clear upon reading that the distinction is not always evident. These four texts may be widely used, and they make persuasive arguments on their own, but they should not necessarily be read as representing the state of the art in early-21st-century thought, as they are very personal accounts.
  25. Donovan, James M. 2007. Legal anthropology: An introduction. Lanham, MD: Altamira.
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  27. An overview of the history of legal anthropology as well as an argument for a more engaged legal anthropology.
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  29. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local knowledge: Fact and law in comparative perspective. In Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. By Clifford Geertz, 167–234. New York: Basic.
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  31. Influential argument for treating law as a cultural system that constructs social realities.
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  33. Moore, Sally Falk. 1978. Law as process: An anthropological approach. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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  35. General theoretical overview, stressing that law should be seen as a process. Comparative in nature; contains a useful discussion of how we might conceptualize the law.
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  37. Roberts, Simon. 1979. Order and dispute: An introduction to legal anthropology. New York: Penguin.
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  39. A useful introductory overview of the history of legal anthropology in the first two thirds of the 20th century, focusing on nonstate forms of order.
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  41. Edited Collections
  42. The two edited collections (Lazarus-Black and Hirsch 1994, Starr and Collier 1989) and the two readers (Mundy 2002, Moore 2005) represent good introduction to the themes and issues in legal anthropology and are recommended to anyone who wants a brief overview of the field, with some concrete examples of particular work.
  43. Lazarus-Black, Mindie, and Susan F. Hirsch, eds. 1994. Contested states: Law, hegemony, and resistance. After the Law. New York and London: Routledge.
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  45. An influential collection of essays, highlighting the role of power and resistance in legal processes.
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  47. Moore, Sally Falk. 2005. Law and anthropology: A reader. Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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  49. A very useful reader, starting with foundational texts and going through to more recent innovations.
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  51. Mundy, Martha, ed. 2002. Law and anthropology. The International Library of Essays in Law and Legal Theory. Aldershot, UKAshgate.
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  53. A useful reader, with a focus on more recent work, and so gives a good sense of early-21st-century directions.
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  55. Starr, June, and Jane F. Collier, eds. 1989. History and power in the study of law: New directions in legal anthropology. Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  57. A useful and influential collection of essays that was part of the reinvigoration of legal anthropology in the late 1980s.
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  59. Classic Accounts
  60. Legal anthropology has its historical roots in attempts to understand how order was maintained in the absence of the state (Hoebel 1954, Llewelyn and Hoebel 1941, Maine 1861, Malinowski 1984). Many 19th- and early-20th-century works therefore describe what were considered to be customary forms of dispute settlement. In theory, this work can be seen partly as a progressive attempt to show that the peoples whom European states were colonizing had equally sophisticated and complex systems of governance (Bohannan 1957, Gluckman 1967, Hoebel 1954). In practice, however, much of this work was caught up in the very processes of colonial control; for example, Schapera 1970, an account of Tswana law, was used by colonial authorities (see also Law and Colonialism). Furthermore, it has also been argued that in many of their classic accounts, anthropologists were exporting Western legal categories in their attempts to study non-Western law (see Nader 1997); it was only later that anthropologists began to study Western legal institutions.
  61. Bohannan, Paul. 1957. Justice and judgment among the Tiv. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
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  63. A classic cultural account of the categories and norms built into the system of “jural control” among the Tiv of northern Nigeria.
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  65. Gluckman, Max. 1967. The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia. 2d ed. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  67. An ethnographic and comparative account of the “judicial” logic of the Lozi, from the leading member of the Manchester school.
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  69. Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1954. The law of primitive man: A study in comparative legal dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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  71. A comparative account of legal processes in nonliterate societies, emphasizing the prevalence of due process concerns.
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  73. Llewellyn, K. N., and E. Adamson Hoebel. 1941. The Cheyenne way: Conflict and case law in primitive jurisprudence. Civilization of the American Indian. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
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  75. Collaboration between a lawyer and an anthropologist that demonstrates the importance of the case study method.
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  77. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient law: Its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas. London: John Murray.
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  79. Victorian evolutionary analysis of pre-modern law, making the classic distinction between status and contact.
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  81. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1984. Crime and custom in savage society. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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  83. Foundational text in British social anthropology, examining processes of social control and punishment from a functionalist perspective. Stresses the importance of ethnography. This is a reprint. Originally published in 1926.
  84. Find this resource:
  85. Nader, Laura, ed. 1997. Law in culture and society. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  87. Contains the classic debate between Bohannan and Gluckman over the universality of Euro-American jurisprudential categories. Gluckman argues for their use; Bohannan, against.
  88. Find this resource:
  89. Schapera, Isaac. 1970. A handbook of Tswana law and custom. 2d ed. Cass Library of African Law. London: Cass.
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  91. An attempt to write the jurisprudence of customary Tswana law, using the categories of Anglo-American common law.
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  93. Disputing
  94. Historically, when anthropologists were looking for lawlike processes, they settled on disputes as the object of study, assuming that law was primarily about the settling of conflicts. This led to a large number of comparative studies of the ways in which normative orders are applied to disputes (Nader and Todd 1978; but for a partial critique, see Comaroff and Roberts 1981) and analysis of why people choose mediation over arbitration (Gulliver 1979). In the 1980s anthropologists began to apply these insights to the United States in particular, examining why people turn to the law (or not) when they have a dispute (Greenhouse 1986; Greenhouse, et al. 1994). There was, however, a growing realization that the choice between mediation and arbitration was shot through with power implications (Merry 1990, Nader 1990). It was also argued that law should not solely be seen as a process of dispute resolution, as this assumes that conflicts are a danger to be controlled rather than an inherent part of social and political life (Strathern 1985). The literature on law and language has also widely dealt with the disputing process (see Law and Language).
  95. Comaroff, John L., and Simon Roberts. 1981. Rules and processes: The cultural logic of dispute in an African context. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  97. An analysis of the relationship between normative orders and disputes, stressing the importance of process.
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  99. Greenhouse, Carol J. 1986. Praying for justice: Faith, order, and community in an American town. Anthropology in Contemporary Issues. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  101. Ethnographic account of the cultural logic of disputing among southern Baptists in the United States.
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  103. Greenhouse, Carol J., Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel. 1994. Law and community in three American towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  105. A comparative account of the cultural logic of disputing in three different American communities.
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  107. Gulliver, P. H. 1979. Disputes and negotiations: A cross-cultural perspective. Studies on Law and Social Control. New York: Academic Press.
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  109. An analytical account of the decision-making process in disputes, drawing on examples from both Tanzania and the United States.
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  111. Merry, Sally Engle. 1990. Getting justice and getting even: Legal consciousness among working-class Americans. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.
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  113. An ethnographic analysis of the meanings given to legal claims in the course of disputes, emphasizing power inequalities. Particularly important for introducing the concept of legal consciousness to anthropology.
  114. Find this resource:
  115. Nader, Laura. 1990. Harmony ideology: Justice and control in a Zapotec mountain village. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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  117. A historical exploration of the relationship between an ideological avoidance of disputes and the entrenchment of the Mexican state.
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  119. Nader, Laura, and Harry F. Todd Jr., eds. 1978. The disputing process: Law in ten societies. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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  121. A classic comparative collection of essays on disputing processes.
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  123. Strathern, Marilyn. 1985. Discovering “social control.” Journal of Law and Society 12.2: 111–134.
  124. DOI: 10.2307/1409963Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  125. A largely theoretical critique of the implicit assumptions behind the focus on disputes in much legal anthropology. Available online through purchase.
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  127. Legal Pluralism
  128. Legal pluralism, the claim that there are plural legal orders operating in a given social context, operates as a critique of the inherent centrism of much legal positivism. Many of the claims of legal pluralism have grown out of work in colonial or postcolonial contexts (Griffiths 1997, Moore 1993,Wilson 2000). They showed not only how the legal systems produced by systems of colonial governance created hierarchies of access to justice, and often contradictory ideas of justice (Wilson 2000), but also how people could use these differing legal forms to their own advantage (Moore 1993). The arguments of legal pluralism have also been applied to Euro-American jurisdictions (Moore 1973). Late-20th-century work moved beyond the claim that states do not have the monopoly on law (Griffiths 1986), to explore the implications of the ways in which law and legal institutions can cross local, regional, and national boundaries (Merry 1988, Merry 1992). However, legal pluralism has been criticized for spreading the concept of law so thinly that it, in effect, applies to all normative orders and therefore loses track of the political and cultural specificity of law (Tamanaha 1993).
  129. Griffiths, Anne M. O. 1997. In the shadow of marriage: Gender and justice in an African community. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  131. An ethnographic application of the theory of legal pluralism to marriage and family disputes in Botswana.
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  133. Griffiths, John. 1986. What is legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law24:1–55.
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  135. A programmatic theoretical argument for the importance of legal pluralism.
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  137. Merry, Sally Engle. 1988. Legal pluralism. Law and Society Review 22.5: 869–896.
  138. DOI: 10.2307/3053638Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  139. Useful, critical review essay on the literature on legal pluralism.
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  141. Merry, Sally Engle. 1992. Anthropology, law, and transnational processes. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 357–379.
  142. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002041Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  143. Although not strictly an argument for legal pluralism, this article reviews anthropological approaches to the multiple forms of legality that stretch across state borders. Available online by subscription.
  144. Find this resource:
  145. Moore, Erin P. 1993. Gender, power, and legal pluralism: Rajasthan, India. American Ethnologist 20.3: 522–542.
  146. DOI: 10.1525/ae.1993.20.3.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. Explores how those marginalized from formal state legal mechanisms seek justice in alternative forums. Available online through purchase.
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  149. Moore, Sally Falk. 1973. Law and social change: The semi-autonomous social field as an appropriate subject of study. Law and Society Review 7.4: 719–746.
  150. DOI: 10.2307/3052967Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  151. A classic theoretical argument about the relationship between different levels of legal process. Available online by subscription.
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  153. Tamanaha, Brian Z. 1993. The folly of the “social scientific” concept of legal pluralism.Journal of Law and Society 20.2: 192–217.
  154. DOI: 10.2307/1410167Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  155. A theoretical critique of the claims of legal pluralism, arguing that there is a danger of spreading the concept of law too thinly. Available online by subscription.
  156. Find this resource:
  157. Wilson, Richard A. 2000. Reconciliation and revenge in post-apartheid South Africa: Rethinking legal pluralism and human rights. Current Anthropology 41.1: 75–98.
  158. DOI: 10.1086/300104Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  159. An ethnographic application of the concept of legal pluralism to conflicts over transitional justice in post-apartheid South Africa.
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  161. Law and Colonialism
  162. Historically, legal anthropologists have often worked in colonial or postcolonial contexts. Research in the early 20th century tried to examine what were taken to be customary legal processes. However, in the latter half of the 20th century, there was an increasing emphasis on the ways in which the colonial process has itself changed or had even created what counted as customary law (Chanock 1998, Fitzpatrick 1980, Moore 1986). As the law was seen as a cornerstone of the civilizing process, it played a central role in colonial-inspired transformations of culture, society, and politics (Merry 1999). It was also pointed out that many of the earlier studies of customary law, for example,Schapera 1970 (cited under Classic Accounts), had been complicit in the reification of custom (Merry 1991). Scholars have paid attention as well to law as a technique of colonial control (Cohn 1989,Mamdani 1996, Saumarez Smith 1985). At the same time, it has also been recognized that, following independence, many states have taken up colonial customary law as a supposedly more authentic form of social order than common or civil law courts.
  163. Chanock, Martin. 1998. Law, custom, and social order: The colonial experience in Malawai and Zambia. African Studies series. Portsmouth, NY: Heinemann.
  164. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  165. A historical account of the role of colonialism in the production of customary law.
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  167. Cohn, Bernard S. 1989. Law and the colonial state in India. In History and power in the study of law: New directions in legal anthropology. Anthropology of Contemporary Issues. Edited by June Starr and Jane F. Collier, 131–152. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
  168. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  169. Historical account of how the British colonial presence in India created an Anglicized form of Hindu law.
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  171. Fitzpatrick, Peter. 1980. Law and state in Papua New Guinea. Law, State, and Society series. London and New York: Academic Press.
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  173. A Marxist-inspired analysis of the role of capital and colonialism in the creation of legal forms in Papua New Guinea.
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  175. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  177. A critical and controversial argument about the role of colonial forms of governance in late-20th-century ethnic divisions in sub-Saharan Africa.
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  179. Merry, Sally Engle. 1991. Review essay: Law and colonialism. Law and Society Review 25.4: 889–922.
  180. DOI: 10.2307/3053874Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  181. A very useful review essay on the relationship between law and colonialism. Available online by subscription.
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  183. Merry, Sally Engle. 1999. Colonizing Hawai’i: The cultural power of law. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  184. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  185. A cultural history of Hawaiian law in the context of U.S. colonialism.
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  187. Moore, Sally Falk. 1986. Social facts and fabrications: “Customary” law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  188. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  189. A classic and fine-grained ethnohistory of colonialism and “customary” law in one part of Tanzania.
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  191. Saumarez Smith, Richard. 1985. Rule-by-records and rule-by-reports: Complementary aspects of the British imperial rule of law. Contributions to Indian Sociology 19.1: 153–176.
  192. DOI: 10.1177/006996685019001010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  193. Contends that the registration of land rights can be a form of social engineering, as it tries to fit people into preordained legal categories. Available online through purchase.
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  195. Human Rights
  196. As they increasingly turned their attention to self-consciously modern legal institutions, anthropologists often focused on human rights. The debate over the merits of relativism versus universalism was initially very important (An-Na’im 1992; Cowan, et al. 2001; Engle 2001). However, in the late 1990s anthropologists increasingly began to study human rights in practice, exploring the ways in which they were taken up or rejected and given meaning as part of specific local struggles (Englund 2006, Merry 2005, Wilson 2001). It has been argued, however, that in spreading the concept of human rights so widely, there is a danger of losing track of its specificity as a very particular form of political and legal engagement (Riles 2006).
  197. Culture
  198. Following the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s, anthropologists were initially skeptical about its apparently universalizing cultural claims (Engle 2001,Messer 1993). However, work in the 1990s increasingly either tried to show the cross-cultural basis of human rights norms (An-Na’im 1992) or came to question the assumptions behind the distinction between universal and culturally specific claims about human rights (Wilson 1997). In particular, it was argued that human rights and notions of culture can be mutually constitutive of one another (Cowan, et al. 2001).
  199. An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed. 1992. Toward a cross-cultural approach to defining international standards of human rights: The meaning of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. In Human rights in cross-cultural perspectives: A quest for consensus. Edited by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, 19–43. Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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  201. An attempt to explore how specific human rights can have cultural purchase in an Islamic context.
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  203. Cowan, Jane K., Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds. 2001. Culture and rights: Anthropological perspectives. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  205. Influential collection of essays on the tension between ideas about culture and rights, which goes well beyond the debate between relativism and universalism.
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  207. Engle, Karen. 2001. From skepticism to embrace: Human rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999. Human Rights Quarterly 23.3: 536–559.
  208. DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2001.0034Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  209. Useful historical overview of the intellectual and political responses of anthropologists to human rights claims.
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  211. Messer, Ellen. 1993. Anthropology and human rights. Annual Review of Anthropology 22:221–249.
  212. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.001253Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  213. Useful overview of anthropological approaches to human rights, although now somewhat dated. Available online through purchase.
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  215. Wilson, Richard, ed. 1997. Human rights, culture and context: Anthropological perspectives. London and Chicago: Pluto.
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  217. Important text representing the renewed interest in human rights by anthropologists that took place in the late 1990s. Argues that we have to understand human rights in local contexts.
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  219. Ethnographies
  220. As the debate over relativism has moved into the background, anthropologists have taken to studying human rights in practice. The result has a been a growth of ethnographies of the ways in which differently located people use human rights claims as part of their own struggles, the ways in which human rights are made locally relevant (Merry 2005, Merry 2006), and the potentials and limitations that people face when doing so (Englund 2006, Riles 2000, Riles 2006, Ross 2003,Wilson 2001).
  221. Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of freedom: Human rights and the African poor. California Series in Public Anthropology. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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  223. A critical ethnographic account of human rights interventions in Malawi, arguing that human rights activism can hamper the struggle for democratic citizenship.
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  225. Merry, Sally Engle. 2005. Human rights and gender violence: Translating international law into local justice. Chicago Series in Law and Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  227. Asserts that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be effective in altering existing social hierarchies.
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  229. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle.American Anthropologist 108.1: 38–51.
  230. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.38Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Discusses the conditions that can make human rights locally meaningful, arguing that intermediaries are a central part of the processes. Available online through purchase.
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  233. Riles, Annelise. 2000. The network inside out. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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  235. Influential ethnographic study that attempts to explore the specificity of human rights practices.
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  237. Riles, Annelise. 2006. Anthropology, human rights, and legal knowledge: Culture in the iron cage. American Anthropologist 108.1: 52–65.
  238. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.52Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Contends that the difficulties faced by anthropologists when trying to engage with human actors can be understood in the context of the legal instrumentalism of human rights. Available online through purchase.
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  241. Ross, Fiona C. 2003. Bearing witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Anthropology, Culture, and Society. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto.
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  243. Provides a critical account of the limitation of human rights testimony for those who have experienced violence.
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  245. Wilson, Richard A. 2001. The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  246. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511522291Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Examines the different notions of justice involved in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s attempts to come to terms with apartheid through the idiom of human rights.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Activism
  250. As anthropologists have studied human rights, their commitments to the claims advanced by the people they study and the normative and political implications of using human rights more broadly have caused a great deal of reflection. The view among some scholars is that anthropologists should take up the human rights struggles of the people they work with, albeit with a critical edge (Speed 2006). For other scholars, there are important questions as to whether and how anthropology can contribute to the wider ethical and political debates of which human rights is a part (Goodale 2006).
  251. Goodale, Mark. 2006. Ethical theory as social practice. American Anthropologist 108.1: 25–37.
  252. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.25Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  253. Discusses the ways in which anthropological insights can make useful contributions to wider human rights debates.
  254. Find this resource:
  255. Speed, Shannon. 2006. At the crossroads of human rights and anthropology: Toward a critically engaged activist research. American Anthropologist 108.1: 66–77.
  256. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.66Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  257. Makes the case for a critical and politicized engagement with human rights claims by anthropologists. Available online through purchase.
  258. Find this resource:
  259. Property
  260. Anthropology has historically seen property as a relationship not between persons and things, but between persons in relation to things (Hann 1998). Exploring historically specific property regimes has therefore been a way of examining differing notions of the person; sociality; and the ways in which they relate to objects, whether material or immaterial.
  261. Land
  262. Post-Soviet transformations in property regimes since the late 1980s have reflected a reinvigorated interest in the social and political implications of different forms of land ownership (Hann 1993, Hann 1998, Verdery 1998), while private property forms are seen as increasingly ubiquitous (Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 1994). Research has also questioned implicitly teleological and deterministic assumptions about the growth of Western-style capitalist property regimes (Blomley 2005, Mundy and Saumarez Smith 2007). Other work has shown how the maintenance of private property can rely on forms of extralegal violence (Holston 1991).
  263. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. 1994. Property, politics and conflict: Ambon and Minangkabau compared. Law and Society Review 28.3: 589–608.
  264. DOI: 10.2307/3054079Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  265. Compares differences in disputing processes around property in two regions of Indonesia against the backdrop of monetization and sedentarization. Available online by subscription.
  266. Find this resource:
  267. Blomley, Nicholas. 2005. The borrowed view: Privacy, propriety, and the entanglements of property. Law and Social Inquiry 30.4: 617–661.
  268. DOI: 10.1086/500177Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  269. Argues against the view that associates private property with privacy and autonomy, by exploring the ways in which ownership can come freighted with public responsibilities. Available online by subscription.
  270. Find this resource:
  271. Hann, C. M. 1993. From production to property: Decollectivization and the family–land relationship in contemporary Hungary. Man n.s. 28.2: 299–320.
  272. DOI: 10.2307/2803415Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  273. Examines the difficulties in establishing capitalist property relations over agricultural land in post-Socialist Hungary. Available online through purchase.
  274. Find this resource:
  275. Hann, C. M., ed. 1998. Property relations: Renewing the anthropological tradition. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  276. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  277. Comparative collection that seeks to apply the argument that property is a “bundle of rights” and that property relationships are fundamentally social relationships.
  278. Find this resource:
  279. Holston, James. 1991. The misrule of law: Land and usurpation in Brazil. Comparative Studies in Society and History 33.4: 695–725.
  280. DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500017291Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  281. Asserts that the Brazilian legal system deliberately produces forms of bureaucratic irresolution that foster extralegal forms of land appropriation, which are then in turn reincorporated into the legal process. Available online through purchase.
  282. Find this resource:
  283. Mundy, Martha, and Richard Saumarez Smith. 2007. Governing property, making the modern state: Law, administration and production in Ottoman Syria. Library of Ottoman Studies 9. London and New York: Tauris.
  284. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  285. Detailed historical analysis of Ottoman property reforms in the 19th century, arguing that we should not see legal changes as being imported solely from the West.
  286. Find this resource:
  287. Verdery, Katherine. 1998. Transnationalism, nationalism, citizenship, and property: Eastern Europe since 1989. American Ethnologist 25.2: 291–306.
  288. DOI: 10.1525/ae.1998.25.2.291Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  289. Looks at the interaction of local and transnational processes in the transformation of post-Soviet property regimes. Available online through purchase.
  290. Find this resource:
  291. New Property Regimes
  292. New developments in biotechnology have created the possibility of owning genes and other entities derived from human bodies. In so doing, they have helped destabilize the classic distinction between persons and things (Pottage 1998, Strathern 1996), causing social anxieties over the potential to own human beings (Lock 2001).
  293. Lock, Margaret. 2001. The alienation of body tissue and the biopolitics of immortalized cell lines. Body and Society 7.2–3: 63–91.
  294. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X0100700204Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. A useful review article looking at the controversies aroused by claims of owning parts of the human body. Available online through purchase.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Pottage, Alain. 1998. The inscription of life in law: Genes, patents, and bio-politics. Modern Law Review 61.5: 740–765.
  298. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2230.00177Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. A critical analytical account of the ways in which arguments over the appropriation of genes as property articulate a set of productive misunderstandings about the workings of the patent process. Available online by subscription.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. Potential property: Intellectual rights and property in persons. Social Anthropology 4.1: 17–32.
  302. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8676.1996.tb00311.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. Theoretical exploration of the implications of “potentiality” for our understandings of property in persons.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Culture
  306. Anthropologists have increasingly examined the implications of claims to own knowledge or culture (Born 1996, Brown 1998, Coombe 1998, Hernández-Reguant 2004). This work has raised questions about whether we think of culture and knowledge as objects or processes, the relationship between ethnographic and analytical categories, and the social and political implications of ownership over intangible objects (Harding 2003).
  307. Born, Georgina. 1996. (Im)materiality and sociality: The dynamics of intellectual property in a computer software research culture. Social Anthropology 4.2: 101–116.
  308. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8676.1996.tb00319.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  309. An empirical study of the dynamics of intellectual property, drawing out the relationship between the material and the social. Available online through purchase.
  310. Find this resource:
  311. Brown, Michael F. 1998. Can culture be copyrighted? Current Anthropology 39.2: 193–222.
  312. DOI: 10.1086/204721Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  313. A skeptical assessment of legal schemes to control cultural appropriation—in particular, proposals that indigenous peoples should be permitted to copyright ideas rather than their tangible expression.
  314. Find this resource:
  315. Coombe, Rosemary J. 1998. The cultural life of intellectual properties: Authorship, appropriation, and the law. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  316. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  317. Explores the social and political implications of the proliferation of legally protected cultural texts and their potential infringements.
  318. Find this resource:
  319. Harding, Sarah. 2003. Defining traditional knowledge: Lessons from cultural property.Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 11.2: 511–518.
  320. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  321. A critical account of the notion of tradition in attempts to repatriate Native American cultural property.
  322. Find this resource:
  323. Hernández-Reguant, Ariana. 2004. Copyrighting Che: Art and authorship under Cuban late Socialism. Public Culture 16.1: 1–29.
  324. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-16-1-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  325. An exploration of the valorization of artistic labor in late Socialism, under pressure from possessive individualism and new forms of transnational identification.
  326. Find this resource:
  327. Law and Violence
  328. The tensions between law and violence have become an increasingly important issue in legal anthropology. On the one hand, legal processes claim to be the antithesis of violence, in that they are rational and just (Borneman 1997). On the other hand, legal processes claim the monopoly on the “legitimate use of violence” and use coercion to enforce many of their claims (Eckert 2005). Work on law and violence has therefore tried to determine how legal categories create historically specific distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence (Asad 1996, Lazarus-Black 2001). Studies have also explored how conflicts over what constitutes a legitimate form of violence are constantly played out in the margins of the law (Caldeira 2002, Eckert 2005, Goldstein 2003).
  329. Asad, Talal. 1996. On torture, or cruel inhuman, and degrading treatment. Social Research63.4: 1081–1109.
  330. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. Argues that the modern history of the prohibition of torture is not only a record of the progressive prohibition of cruelty, but also part of the story of the modern secular concept of what it means to be human.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Borneman, John. 1997. Settling accounts: Violence, justice, and accountability in postsocialist states. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  334. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Asserts that legally sanctioned retributive justice is important in situations of political transition if we are to avoid collective violence.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2002. The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil. Ethnography3.3: 235–263.
  338. DOI: 10.1177/146613802401092742Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Explores the logic of popular support for police violence among the working class, which coexists with their victimization by law enforcement officials. Available online through purchase.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Eckert, Julia. 2005. Death and the nation: State killing in India. In The cultural lives of capital punishment: Comparative perspectives. Edited by Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, 195–218. Cultural Lives of the Law. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  342. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. Explores the relationship between a judicial system of capital punishment that is slow and inefficient and public support for extralegal police killings.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Goldstein, Daniel M. 2003. “In our own hands”: Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia.American Ethnologist 30.1: 22–43.
  346. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2003.30.1.22Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Examines the ways in which vigilantism acts as a moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law. Available onlinethrough purchase.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Lazarus-Black, Mindie. 2001. Law and the pragmatics of inclusion: Governing domestic violence in Trinidad and Tobago. American Ethnologist 28.2: 388–416.
  350. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2001.28.2.388Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. Considers the meaning of agency for persons seeking legal redress from domestic abuse.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Citizenship and Migration
  354. The relationship between those who act in the name of the state and their citizens/subjects is often expressed in the legalized terms of right, responsibility, and obligation. The anthropology of citizenship has therefore examined how legal citizenship is constructed in particular contexts, and, especially, the tension between the requirement to equality, on the one hand, and the naturalization of difference, on the other, found in many modern citizenship regimes (Collier, et al. 1995; Coutin, et al. 2002; Holston 2008). More specifically, anthropologists have examined the implications of citizenship regimes for those who find themselves spread across national borders as migrants or undocumented workers (De Genova 2002). This work has explored the tension between the ways in which migrants can strategically manipulate legal claims and the ways in which the law can be used as a form of exclusion (Coutin 2000, Kelly 2004, Ong 1999).
  355. Collier, Jane F., Bill Maurer, and Liliana Suárez-Navaz. 1995. Sanctioned identities: Legal constructions of modern personhood. Identities 2.1–2: 1–27.
  356. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  357. Theoretical review, focusing on the tensions between equality and difference in modern citizenship regimes.
  358. Find this resource:
  359. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 2000. Legalizing moves: Salvadoran immigrants’ struggle for U.S. residency. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
  360. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  361. An ethnography of struggles for legal permanent residency in the United States, stressing that legality and illegality are not distinct positions.
  362. Find this resource:
  363. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 2005. Being en route. American Anthropologist 107.2: 195–206.
  364. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2005.107.2.195Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  365. Explores “clandestinity” as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality for migrants, state officials, and anthropologists. Available online through purchase.
  366. Find this resource:
  367. Coutin, Susan Bibler, Bill Maurer, and Barbara Yngvesson. 2002. In the mirror: The legitimation work of globalization. Law and Social Inquiry 27.4: 801–843.
  368. DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2002.tb00982.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  369. Examines the processes that produce legitimate and illegitimate connection and movement, focusing on international adoptions, immigration, and finance. Available online by subscription.
  370. Find this resource:
  371. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–447.
  372. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  373. A very useful review essay that examines research on illegal migrants, arguing that it is important to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of “illegalization.”
  374. Find this resource:
  375. Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. In-formation Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  376. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  377. Explores how the history of Brazilian citizenship as universal in principle and unequal in practice is being challenged by grassroots forms of mobilization in the name of democracy.
  378. Find this resource:
  379. Kelly, Tobias. 2004. Returning home? Law, violence, and displacement among West Bank Palestinians. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27.2: 95–112.
  380. DOI: 10.1525/pol.2004.27.2.95Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  381. Examines the ways in which experiences of displacement are formed in the tensions between the processes that make people mobile and those that keep them in place. Available online through purchase.
  382. Find this resource:
  383. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  384. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  385. An ethnographic and theoretical examination of the creation of a transnational Chinese public, arguing that such flows are not necessarily detrimental to the nation-state.
  386. Find this resource:
  387. Law and Language
  388. Language is the medium through which law does most of its work (Conley and O’Barr 1990, Conley and O’Barr 2005, O’Barr 1982). Indeed, the ways in which law tries to deal with disputes through linguistic interactions can be seen as the very thing that differentiates legal processes from other forms of conflict: disputes have linguistic forms, as opposed to the physical nature of violence (Brenneis 1988, Mertz 1994). Many of the tensions within law, such as between equality and difference (see Citizenship and Migration) or normative plurality and normative monism (see Legal Pluralism), are also expressed linguistically. Anthropologists have therefore explored not just the written texts of law, but also its spoken interactions, and in doing so have examined the micropolitics of linguistic utterances (Richland 2008) as well as the ways in which legal language can contain very specific ideological visions of the world (Haviland 2003).
  389. Brenneis, Donald. 1988. Language and disputing. Annual Review of Anthropology 17:221–237.
  390. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.17.100188.001253Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. A very useful review essay looking at anthropological and linguistic approaches to the disputing process.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Conley, John M., and William M. O’Barr. 1990. Rules versus relationships: The ethnography of legal discourse. Language and Legal Discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  394. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  395. Focusing on the use of language, examines the experiences of litigants seeking redress through the small claims courts of the American legal system.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Conley, John M., and William M. O’Barr. 2005. Just words: Law, language, and power. 2d ed. Language and Legal Discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  398. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. An examination of what language reveals about the power of the law, built around case studies of specific areas of American law.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Haviland, John B. 2003. Ideologies of language: Some reflections on language and U.S. law. In Special issue: Language politics and practices. Edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Susan H. Lees. American Anthropologist, n.s. 105.4: 764–774.
  402. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2003.105.4.764Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403. Contends that the language ideologies of the law both influence legal outcomes and conflict with scientific ideas about language. Available online through purchase.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Mertz, Elizabeth. 1994. Legal language: Pragmatics, poetics, and social power. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:435–455.
  406. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.23.100194.002251Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. A review article that places the scholarship on legal language within the context of more recent linguistic-anthropological understandings of language use and contextualization. Available online by subscription.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. O’Barr, William M. 1982. Linguistic evidence: Language, power, and strategy in the courtroom. Studies on Law and Social Control. New York: Academic Press.
  410. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. A detailed analysis of the different types of speech used in an American courtroom.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Richland, Justin B. 2008. Arguing with tradition: The language of law in Hopi tribal court. Chicago Series in Law and Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  414. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. An ethnography that explores how the tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition drive the jurisprudence of a contemporary Native American legal system and make it unique.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Law and Islam
  418. The anthropology of what are seen as Islamic legal processes has, as with much legal anthropology, largely tried to challenge a unified and static vision of law, questioning the very idea of a transcultural entity known as Islamic law, while recognizing the specificity of self-consciously Islamic legal practices. In doing so, anthropologists have explored the plurality of the forms of reasoning and normative order found in Islamic contexts (Bowen 2003, Maurer 2005, Osanloo 2006). Whereas some scholars have tried to argue for the distinctiveness of Islamic law as a way of approaching the world (Rosen 1989), others have examined how what counts as Islamic law has been transformed in the context of colonialism and the expansion of capital (Messick 1993, Starr 1992). Perhaps the dominant theme in this work has been the ways in which the use of Islamic law can both challenge and reinforce gender hierarchies (Hirsch 1998, Mir-Husseini 1993, Osanloo 2006).
  419. Bowen, John R. 2003. Islam, law and equality in Indonesia: An anthropology of public reasoning. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  420. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511615122Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  421. Historical and ethnographic account of attempts to reconcile radically different sets of norms and laws, including those derived from Islam, local social norms, and contemporary ideas about gender equality and rule of law.
  422. Find this resource:
  423. Hirsch, Susan F. 1998. Pronouncing and persevering: Gender and the discourses of disputing in an African Islamic court. Language and Legal Discourse. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  424. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  425. Based on ethnographic research, shows how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform their domestic lives, but in doing so also reinforce their image as being subordinate to men.
  426. Find this resource:
  427. Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual life, limited: Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  428. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  429. An ethnographic account of Islamic finance that seeks to answer broader questions about the social anthropology of money.
  430. Find this resource:
  431. Messick, Brinkley. 1993. The calligraphic state: Textual domination and history in a Muslim society. Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  432. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  433. An innovative combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory that examines the changing relation between writing and authority in Yemen from the late 19th century to the late 20th.
  434. Find this resource:
  435. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. 1993. Marriage on trial: A study of Islamic family law: Iran and Morocco compared. Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East. London and New York: Taurus.
  436. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  437. Comparing Iran and Morocco, shows how women may turn even the most patriarchal elements of Islamic law to their advantage and achieve their personal marital aims.
  438. Find this resource:
  439. Osanloo, Arzoo. 2006. Islamico-civil “rights talk”: Women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court. American Ethnologist 33.2: 191–209.
  440. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.191Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  441. Explores how Iranian women push for tangible benefits in reformulated Islamico-civil family courts that allow them to express themselves as individual, rights-bearing citizens.
  442. Find this resource:
  443. Rosen, Lawrence. 1989. The Anthropology of justice: Law as culture in Islamic society. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  444. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  445. Starting with Islamic family courts in Morocco, contends that legal concepts have to be understood as part of broader cultural notions and practices.
  446. Find this resource:
  447. Starr, June. 1992. Law as metaphor: From Islamic courts to the Palace of Justice. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.
  448. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  449. Historical analysis of the social and cultural implications of the secularization of Turkish law.
  450. Find this resource:
  451. Law and Indigeneity
  452. Many claims for the protection of indigenous peoples, cultures, and ways of life often take legal form. Legal anthropologists have therefore examined the tensions within legal claims about indigeneity (Biolsi 2005, Hodgson 2002, Richland 2007). As with the anthropology of colonialism generally (seeLaw and Colonialism), it has been argued that many indigenous cultural and political forms, and even the very category of indigeneity, have their origins in colonial and postcolonial legal categories (Biolsi 2001, Povinelli 2002); it has also been argued that by expressing their claims in legal terms, indigenous people are often limiting what they can say and do (Clifford 1988, Weiner 1999). Nevertheless, the ways in which law can provide an invaluable resource to indigenous populations have been examined (Niezen 2003, Speed 2008). Work on law and indigeneity has often focused on property claims, and so there is a great deal of overlap between the readings in this section and those in Property.
  453. Biolsi, Thomas. 2001. Deadliest enemies: Law and the making of race relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  454. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. Bringing together archival research and ethnography, this book traces the origins of racial tension between Native Americans and whites, showing how the courts have created opposing political interests along race lines.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Biolsi, Thomas. 2005. Imagined geographies: Sovereignty, indigenous space, and American Indian struggle. American Ethnologist 32.2: 239–259.
  458. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2005.32.2.239Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. Explores the spatial politics of indigenous American struggles with the state, which challenge modular notions of the sovereign nation-state. Available online through purchase.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Clifford, James. 1988. Identity in Mashpee. In The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature and art. By James Clifford, 277–348. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  462. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Focuses on the story of a New England Native American tribe’s attempts to be legally recognized as such. Argues that “culture as identity” must always and necessarily fail to account fully for the histories that converge on any one individual.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2002. Precarious alliances: The cultural politics and structural predicaments of the indigenous rights movement in Tanzania. American Anthropologist, n.s. 104.4: 1086–1097.
  466. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2002.104.4.1086Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. Examines why, despite attempts to foster unity, the indigenous rights movement has been fractured by sometimes quite hostile disagreements. Available online through purchase.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Niezen, Ronald. 2003. The origins of indigenism: Human rights and the politics of identity. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  470. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. Focuses on the relationship between the frameworks of international law and the struggles of those calcimining indigenous rights.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  474. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Argues that multiculturalism demands that indigenous populations meet an impossible standard of “authentic culture.”
  476. Find this resource:
  477. Richland, Justin B. 2007. Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the “edge” of Hopi sovereignty. American Ethnologist 34.3: 540–557.
  478. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.540Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Argues for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity, in which claims to cultural distinctiveness are either libratory or reifying. Available online through purchase.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Speed, Shannon. 2008. Rights in rebellion: Indigenous struggle and human rights in Chiapas. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
  482. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Explores how a range of indigenous groups in Mexico have sought to use international human rights claims as part of their broader struggles.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Weiner, James F. 1999. Culture in a sealed envelope: The concealment of Australian Aboriginal heritage and tradition in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5.2: 193–210.
  486. DOI: 10.2307/2660693Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Asserts that the legislative requirements for the presentation of indigenous culture conceal the extent to which this culture is itself elicited by the very form and process of the legislation. Available onlinethrough purchase.
  488. Find this resource:
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