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Indigenous Culture and Lawyer's Law in India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
Anthropologists' view of law, as Bohannan (1963: 288) recently summarized, is generally concerned with two aspects: one studies the legal procedures of foreign cultures and discovers and compares inquisitorial and correctional devices, and the other focuses on basic axioms or ‘postulates’ underlying the stated norms or laws of a society. Bohannan amplifies the scope by noting that not only the ‘institutions of counteraction’ should be studied but also the events that precede and follow counteraction, for the anthropologist has learnt that legal institutions are, after all, a product of and constantly molded by indigenous culture. We are better aware of this interrelationship in simple cultures (for examples, see Bohannan, 1957; Gluckman, 1955,1965; Hoebel, 1954; Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941; Pospisil, 1958; Schapera, 1938; and Beattie, 1957). The anthropologist has attempted to compare and analyze the legal institutions of one society with another, and tried to learn what the natives thought they ought to do, and what they thought constituted a ‘breach’ of norms.
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- Legal Cultures
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972
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