Description
Book Synopsis How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.
Trade Review “…essential reading for scholars interested in understanding sociopolitical change under globalization in the early 21st century…I recommend [this volume] for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in legal anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of the state, and globalization. Several chapters could also be creatively woven into courses on the anthropology of religion.” · PoLAR
"...there is much common ground between the contributors, and the variety of contexts and situations are valuable for showing how the unifying themes… work out on different grounds." · Journal of Legal Pluralism
"This fascinating collection of articles sheds new light on the way law exercises power in a transnational world, from the crises of terrorism to the subtle introduction of new law within development projects. This set of articles provides new evidence of the important insights offered by legal pluralism and anthropological methodologies for understanding the nature of transnational, national, and local systems of law." · Sally Engle Merry, New York University
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Power of Law
Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths
POWER OF LAW AS DISCOURSE: CLAIMS TO LEGITIMACY AND HIGHER MORALITY
Chapter 1. The Military Order of 13 November 2001: An Ethnographic Reading
Carol J. Greenhouse
Chapter 2. Law and the Frontiers of Illegalities
Laura Nader
Chapter 3. Selective Scrutiny: Supranational Engagement with Minority Protection and Rights in Europe
Jane K. Cowan
Chapter 4. The Globalization of Fatwas amidst the Terror Wars against Pluralism
Upendra Baxi
Chapter 5. Human Rights, Cultural Relativism and Legal Pluralism: Towards a Two-dimensional Debate
Franz von Benda-Beckmann
AT THE INTERSECTION OF LEGALITIES
Chapter 6. Learning Communities and Legal Spaces: Community based Fisheries Management in a Globalizing World
Melanie G. Wiber and John F. Kearney
Chapter 7. Project Law – a Power Instrument of Development Agencies: A Case Study from Burundi
Markus Weilenmann
Chapter 8. Half-Told Truths and Partial Silence: Managing Communication in Scottish Children’s Hearings
Anne Griffiths and Randy F. Kandel
RELIGION AS A RESOURCE IN LEGAL PLURALISM
Chapter 9. Keeping the Stream of Justice Clear and Pure: The Buddhicization of Bhutanese Law
Richard W. Whitecross
Chapter 10. Balancing Islam, Adat and the State: Comparing Islamic and Civil Courts in Indonesia
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann
Chapter 11. Kings, Monks, Bureaucrats and the Police: Tibetan Responses to Law and Authority
Fernanda Pirie
Notes on Contributors
Index
