Goodale, Mark, and Sally Engle Merry (eds.). The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press).
Performance record
Studienleistung: Presentation of the results of a group discussion
Modulleistung: Exam (Klausur)
Miscellanea
Classes consist of lectures followed by discussions in groups.
Why study law from anthropological perspectives? There are a number of reasons why anthropologists would and should do so. Ethnography has above all shown that “law” is not only “black letter law” but comes with a certain culture. In other words, law is embedded in certain configurations of power, is rooted in a certain cosmology, or worldview, is enacted in a certain institutional framework, and performed in a certain style. Law plays an important role in individual and collective identity formation, like who is a citizen, and who is not – who belongs, and who does not. Disputes can hence be seen as diagnostic events, as they constitute important openings into the socio-cultural, political and economic fabric of a given society. That is to say, what constitutes a dispute, its resolution, or “justice” is culturally inflected. A major theme of the course is the changing notion and role of law in the globalized world. Another is the transformation of cultural traditions in the indigenous rights movement. We will furthermore look more deeply into forms of legal pluralism, for example into the accommodation of customary and religious norms and institutions in colonial and contemporary state law. We will last but not least inquire into the implementation of project law and trace the vernacularization of human rights in connection with the cultural translation paradigm.
