The concept of legal anthropology
Legal anthropology, a study of the legal dimension of human life in various historical epochs and various regions of the world, has long been an established field in the human sciences. It emerged at the junction of jurisprudence and a number of disciplines, such as social anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy. Among the important formative influences coming from within the legal field itself were studies in history of law (especially ancient law) and comparative jurisprudence. Legal anthropology was shaped as a scholarly discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Russia the development of the discipline was significantly influenced by the notion of legal pluralism understood as a coexistence of two or more legal systems simultaneously shaping the behavior of an individual. The growing interest toward research in legal anthropology at the present time is indeed in no small measure generated by the fact that customs and traditions of native peoples are becoming part of state legal systems. Today legal anthropology pays special attention to the comparative study of traditional and modern law systems, of local cultures, individual rights, as well as rights of people within the international and national law systems.
Legal anthropology functions not only as an academic discipline studying the legal process in order to reach a better understanding of the legal dimension of human life, but also as an applied discipline driven by the determination to better the modern legislation and make it more sensitive to life ways that are regulated by diverse norms. Legal anthropology has been increasingly, and deservedly, introduced into various university teaching programs in the past years. Research in legal anthropology is based on the combination of the normative and process analysis methods. It rests on the practices of ethnography grounded in fieldwork: direct observation, interviewing, and audiovisual techniques. What enables legal anthropology to study the legal dimension of human life is first and foremost the examination of actual relations into which people enter by following or breaking laws, the questioning of actual legal disputes that arise between people with or without regard to their ethnic identities, for ethnic relations may be indeed only one aspect of a multifaceted issue. Internationally, legal anthropology is promoted through the activities of the IUAES Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, and other organizations and journals, such as “Law and Anthropology”, “Law and Society Review”, “Journal of Legal Pluralism”, “Droit et Cultures”. One of the coordinating centers of legal anthropology in Russia is the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which sponsors work on the Research in Legal Anthropology [Issledovaniia po yuridicheskoi antropologii] series. It is symbolic that the logo of the series is the “cradle bird”, woodgrouse or grey hen, which in the beliefs of Khanty and Mansy is a guardian of child’s health and well-being and is depicted sitting at the head of a birch-bark cradle.
We hope that this website will help scholars and others interested in developments in legal anthropology to get in touch with each other, learn about research projects and publications, and stimulate discussions of problems and prospects of the discipline as it is practiced and taught at universities.
We look forward to a fruitful collaboration!