Legal Pluralism in Infrastructural Designs: Alternative Supply Chains in the Moroccan Argan Oil Export

Bertram Turner

doi:10.1177/01622439211042666

Abstract

This article explores an emergent assemblage in which material semiotics interacts with legal plurality. It is argued that infrastructural designs constitute specific configurations of such assemblages. While research on infrastructure is proliferating in anthropology and STS, law as a constitutive component in all its forms and manifestations has not yet been sufficiently examined from this perspective. Infrastructures enact the ordering of their constitutive components and develop their own specific legal configurations. They combine components from various legal registers with routinized social practices and the normativity of technologies and materiality. Law in infrastructure is thus in itself inherently plural. The article exemplifies what plural law does to infrastructures and how social and legal relations take on infrastructural properties. These plural technolegal entanglements are examined using a case study of one specific strand within the infrastructure of the multilayered supply chain that brings Moroccan argan oil to the global market. This strand emerged in response to the breakdown of a supply infrastructure that was set up as a model development cooperation project.

Highlights

In this article, I take the relationship between anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) with respect to law, especially to legal pluralism (LP), as an epistemological point of departure for the analysis of infrastructure’s underlying legal entanglements
This article theorizes supply chain infrastructure as an emergent assemblage and analyzes how plural law is scripted in infrastructural design in coproduction with constitutive technoscientific and material components
Legal plurality regulates the entanglements of infrastructural components, which in turn display their inherent normative power and ordering capacities

Summary

Introduction

I take the relationship between anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) with respect to law, especially to legal pluralism (LP), as an epistemological point of departure for the analysis of infrastructure’s underlying legal entanglements. A case study in Moroccan argan oil production and distribution will illustrate how legal pluralism is inherently inscribed into infrastructural design.

Results

Conclusion