Abstract
Legal anthropology and legal sociology have much in common. Traditionally, however, these approaches have tried to maintain disciplinary boundaries toward each other. Latest since the 1990s, these boundaries have become more and more porous and the academic practices of boundary-making do seem to convince practitioners of these fields less and less. The recent emergence of a subfield of the anthropology of the state situated at the interface of legal anthropology, legal sociology, ethnographic studies of bureaucracies and organizational sociology attests to this development. In this introduction, we propose to consciously transgress the traditional boundaries between legal anthropology, legal sociology and the anthropology of the state when it comes to the ethnographic investigation of official law. Based on the contributions to this special issue—consisting of empirical articles and commentaries—we map several avenues for boundary transgressions and the theoretical reconceptualizations these may engender. Among them are: looking at legal institutions of the state as practicing both informal formality and formal informality; moving from socio-spatial metaphors to investigating official law-places and -spaces as ethnographic objects; and studying norm-making within official law as a wider field of practice.
Highlights
Jonas Bensa and Larissa Vettersb aInstitute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Collaborative Research Centre Affective Societies, Freie Universit€at Berlin, Berlin, Germany; bMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/ Saale, Germany ABSTRACTLegal anthropology and legal sociology have much in common
For the purpose of this text, we focus on the ethnographic study of official law
We focus on three of them in this article: legal anthropology, legal sociology, and the more recent anthropology of the state
Summary
Independent from these debates among legal anthropologists and legal sociologists, a heightened interest in the state developed among anthropologists since the end of the Cold War. Within this emerging subfield, we find several different approaches: a broad movement of Foucauldian inspired studies of governmentality (e.g. Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Das and Poole 2004; Gupta 2012; see Sharma and Gupta 2006); a range of empirical investigations of “states at work” and the practical norms of state officials in the Global South inspired by a re-reading of Max Weber and Lorenz von Stein (e.g. Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014; de Herdt and Olivier de Sardan 2015); a relational approach for studying transformations of statehood in post-socialist societies as well as Western Europe (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-Beckmann 2018; for a discussion of an African context see Jacobs, this issue); an interest in legal and bureaucratic documentary artefacts and practices as objects of ethnographic study, not least inspired by science and technology studies (Latour 2010; Hull 2012; Mathur 2016); as well as an emerging paradigm of looking at the state in terms of its moral and affective dimension (Stoler 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Fassin et al 2015; Freire de Andrade Neves, this issue).9 Despite their diverging theoretical starting points, these studies converge in the centrality they attribute to ethnography as a research technique.
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