Juan Obarrio, The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 280 pp.This is an important book not only for Mozambique or Africa, but for any anthropologist concerned with law, politics, sovereignty, and statehood. Engaging the vast canvas of legality, trajectories of state formation, and broader dimensions of sociality in Mozambique, Juan Obarrio oscillates between painting with broad strokes and deploying a more pointillist style. Nevertheless, the book ends comprising a surface that is ethnographically colorful, rich in analytical interpretative possibilities, and reflective of broader contemporary theoretical trends in its literary aesthetic. Simply, Obarrio's book will make a lasting contribution to the of post-colonial law and statehood. There are at least two main reasons why this is so.First, a book entitled The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique-without any subtitle-necessarily evokes being something of an engagement with the ideas of Montesquieu's classic work, The Spirit of the Laws (L'esprit des lois) (Secondat 1989). Although Montesquieu is only briefly treated in the book, Obarrio nonetheless writes:The of the laws is an image-concept that has constituted the kernel of state sovereignty since early modern times, from its inception in Europe to its dislocated implementation in colonies (and postcolonies) such as Mozambique...Through formulaic rhetoric, theatrical performance, and fetishism, the spirit of the laws reveals the magicality of the mythological genealogies of the state itself. (12)Being a milestone in the development of not only Enlightenment political thought but also shaping legal and political understandings for centuries, Montesquieu's work still attracts considerable scholarly attention revolving around questions of the nature of the state, the division of power, and the essence of sovereignty. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Montesquieu's seminal tome also informs Obarrio's analysis of the complex workings of law and governance in the post-colonial context of Mozambique. However, Obarrio's turn to Montesquieu and the Enlightenment origins of legal thought also mirrors a broader trend in anthropology (and, indeed, the social sciences) in the last few decades, namely the rediscovery of law. For one, this has meant that old classics within the discipline- such as Bronislaw Malinowski's Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1976 [1926]), Henry Sumner Maine's Ancient Law (1963 [1861]), or Max Gluckman's Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (1967 [1965])-have been revisited in a discipline that seems increasingly to recognize legal orders and practices, and questions of sovereignty, statehood, and justice, as central. One may only mention here the works of Aihwa Ong (2006) or Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2005) on sovereignty, the contributions made by John and Jean Comaroff (2006) or Benda-Beckmann et al. (2009a, 2009b) to understanding the dynamics of law and the vagaries of justice in settings of dynamic change (e.g., Goldstein 2012) or in increasingly plural legal orders (Sieder and McNeish 2013). Obarrio's work is definitely keeping with such anthropological reorientation and, indeed, running through the entire book is a desire to engage law at all relevant levels: from the swanky offices and air-conditioned workshop locales of Western NGOs operating in Maputo to transform the government and the legal sector (mainly examined in Part I), to the everyday life of justice and law as they are performed, negotiated, and negated in community courts in and around the city of Nampula, Northern Mozambique (mostly presented in Part II). Throughout, law is seen as integral to all aspects of politics and sociality. Such a legal-centric perspective of historical transformations and contemporary perturbations in Mozambique is, as Obarrio demonstrates, highly useful.Second, Obarrio's book is a successful attempt to not only do research from below but also to heed the by-now-classic call to study up (Nader 1974 [1969]); the text moves deftly between such hierarchical levels on analytic, theoretical, and empirical grounds. âŠ