What’s Law Got To Do with It?: Anthropological Engagement with Legal Scholarship

Abstract

Among law and society fields, legal anthropology has experienced markedly high highs and low lows. Its parent disciplines, law and anthropology, have fluctuated from intense and productive engagement with one another to mutual disregard for each other’s ways of knowing. Most commentary on the trajectory of this interdisciplinary relationship has bemoaned anthropology’s (ir)relevance to legal scholarship, but this introduction and the symposium essays that follow invert the usual narrative by asking how—and why—formal law might matter to anthropology. The symposium is part of a dual special issue that grows out of a multi-year conversation between legal anthropologists representing varied institutional and intellectual backgrounds. Drawing on that conversation and on the essays it has produced, this introduction argues that anthropologists would do well to abandon their prepositional attitude to formal law and, instead, to build on the strengths of anthropological analysis by “cultivating attentiveness” to things legal.