Abstract
AbstractRather than offering an exhaustive catalogue of anthropological and sociological writings on law in India in the last two to three decades, this review essay shows how the ethnographic gaze constitutes state law in this body of work. Locating ethnography in police stations, forensic laboratories, customary courts, or trial courts implies a rejection of the idea that appellate law exhausts state law. Emphasizing everyday processes of the law and providing accounts of subjection and resistance allows us to re-think the categories that are normalized in the doctrinal picture of law. Ethnographic descriptions of state and non-state law in different sites and temporalities do not merely rehearse Dean Roscoe Pound’s well-known distinction between law in books and law in practice. Rather, these works offer a compelling account of how law is localized, often ceasing to bear resemblance to itself.
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