Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T06:31:23.919Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Law, Space, and Place: Reframing Comparative Law and Legal Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Anne Griffiths
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In her book Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities (2006), Susan Drummond challenges the disciplinary perspectives of comparative law and legal anthropology in her study of Gitano marriage practices. By reframing the way in which the “local” or “locale” is viewed—through an ethnographic study of Gitanos—she displaces the traditional boundaries ascribed to comparative law, with its focus on taxonomy and structure, and with legal anthropology's approach to culture. Her study not only elucidates how national and transnational law intersect, but highlights the complex interconnections between local law and the larger systems of law that attempt to regulate it. This detailed interdisciplinary depiction of the spatial and temporal dimensions of law demonstrates the importance of taking account of scale, projection, and representation that requires both comparative law and legal anthropology to rethink the nature of space and place and their relationship with law from both their macro‐ and microperspectives.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Spring 2009 , pp. 495 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2009 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu‐Lughod, Lila, ed. 1998. Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions. In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, 3–31. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Allott, Antony and Woodman, Gordon R., eds. 1985. People's Law and State Law: The Bellagio Papers. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, ed. Low, Setha M. and Lawrence‐Zúñiga, Denise, 337–50. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas K. 1994. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guildford Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, James, and Marcus, George E., eds. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cowan, Jane. K., Dembour, Marie‐Bénédicte, and Wilson, Richard A., eds. 2001. Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Drummond, Susan G. 2006. Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities. Vancouver: UBC Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol, and Strijbosch, Fons, eds. 1993. Legal Pluralism in Industrialised Societies. Special issue, Journal of Legal Pluralism 33:1–239.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Anne. 1997 In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Anne. 2002. Legal Pluralism. In An Introduction to Law and Social Theory, ed. Banakar, Reza and Travers, Max, 89–310. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.Google Scholar
Griffiths, John. 1986. What Is Legal Pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24:1–55.Google Scholar
Gupta, Akhil, and Ferguson, James. 1992. Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 6–23.Google Scholar
Gupta, Akhil, and Ferguson, James. 1997. Culture. Power and Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hannerz, Ulf. 1992 Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. Writing Ethnography: State of the Art. In Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. Okely, Judith and Callaway, Helen, 116–33. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1979. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Low, Setha, and Lawrence‐Zúñiga, Denise, eds. 2003. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Marcus, George E., and Fisher, Michael M. J., eds. 1989. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Narayan, Kirin. 1997. How Native Is the “Native” Anthropologist? In Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, ed. Lamphere, Louise, Ragoné, Helena, and Zavella, Patricia, 23–41. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nelken, David. 1986. Beyond the Study of Law and “Society”? Henry's “Private Justice” and O'Hagan's “The End of Law. Law & Social Inquiry 11 (2): 323–38.Google Scholar
Okely, Judith. 1992. Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge. In Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. Okely, Judith and Calloway, Helen, 1–28. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Aihwa, Ong. 1996. Anthropology, China and Modernities: The Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge. In The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Moore, Henrietta L., 60–92. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Aihwa, Ong. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sassen, Saskia. 1999. De‐nationalization: Some Conceptual and Empirical Elements, APLA Distinguished Lecture. PoLAR 22 (2): 1–16.Google Scholar
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1987. Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Copnception of Law. Journal of Law and Society 14 (3): 279–302.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Von Benda‐Beckmann, Franz. 1989. Scape‐goat and Magic Charm: Law in Development Theory and Practice. Journal of Legal Pluralism 28:129–48.Google Scholar
Von Benda‐Beckmann, Franz, Von Benda‐Beckmann, Keebet, and Griffiths, Anne, eds. 2005. Introduction. In Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, 1–25. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Weyrauch, Walter Otto, and Bell, Maureen. 1993. Autonomous Lawmaking: The Case of the “Gypsies. Yale Law Journal 103 (2): 323–99.Google Scholar
Wiber, Melanie, 2005. Mobile Law and Globalism: Epistemic Communities versus Community‐Based Innovation in the Fisheries Sector. In Mobile People Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, ed. Von Benda‐Beckmann, Franz, Von Benda‐Beckmann, Keebet, and Griffiths, Anne, 131–51. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Yang, Mayfair. 1996. Tradition, Travelling Theory, Anthropology and the Discourse of Modernity in China. In The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, ed. Moore, Henrietta L., 93–114. London: Routledge.Google Scholar