Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity

192 Pages·2005·1.11 MB·English

Inside and Outside the Law
Law is a discourse of absolutes, and yet it is beset by ambiguities. Legality is inevitably
identified with morality, and yet there is in all legal systems a zone where the legal and
the non-legal become hard to distinguish, and where it is debatable how far the moral and
social standing of particular groups or individuals can be equated with their legal status.
Anthropology is typically concerned with the frontiers of legality, and with groups
defined by the law as marginal. Inside and Outside the Lawreflects on the ambiguities of
law’s authority, drawing on comparative case-studies of ethnic groups within different
modern states, of groups defined as marginal through their sexual behaviour, and on
analyses of the ambiguities at the heart of state authority itself.
Inside and Outside the Lawwill be of interest to political scientists and legal theorists,
as well as anthropologists and sociologists concerned with popular conceptions of the
state and its laws.
Olivia Harris is Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of
London.
European Association of Social Anthropologists
The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) was inaugurated in January
1989, in response to a widely felt need for a professional association which would
represent social anthropologists in Europe and foster co-operation and interchange in
teaching and research. As Europe transforms itself in the nineties, the EASA is dedicated
to the renewal of the distinctive European tradition in social anthropology.
Other titles in the series:
Conceptualizing Society
Adam Kuper
Revitalizing European Rituals
Jeremy Boissevain
Other Histories
Kirsten Hastrup
Alcohol, Gender and Culture
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou
Understanding Rituals
Daniel de Coppet
Gendered Anthropology
Teresa del Valle
Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
Kirsten Hastrup and Peter Hervik
Fieldwork and Footnotes
Hans F.Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan
Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism
Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw
Grasping the Changing World
Václav Hubinger
Civil Society
Chris Hann and Elizabeth Dunn
Nature and Society
Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson
The Ethnography of Moralities
Signe Howell
Inside and Outside the Law
Edited by Olivia Harris
Inside and Outside the Law
Anthropological studies of authority and ambiguity
Edited by Olivia Harris

London and New York
First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1996 selection and editorial matter, Olivia Harris; individual chapters, the
contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Inside and outside the law: anthropological studies of authority and
ambiguity/edited by Olivia Harris.
“Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Law and anthropology. 2. Culture and law. I. Harris, Olivia
K48.A57I57 1997
340′. 115–dc20 96–21564
CIP
ISBN 0-203-45082-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-45954-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format)
ISBN 0-415-12928-1 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-12929-X (pbk)
Contents

Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements ix

1Introduction: inside and outside the law 1

Olivia Harris

Part I The state and its attributes

2Human rights talk and anthropological ambivalence: the particular context of 16
universal claims
Marie-Bénédicte Dembour
3 Vigilantism: order and disorder on the frontiers of the state 33

Ray Abrahams
4 Trading in ambiguity: law, rights and realities in the distribution of land in 45
northern Mozambique
Sue Fleming

Pxart II Sexuality and legitimacy

5The law and the market: rhetorics of exclusion and inclusion among London 60
prostitutes
Sophie Day
6 In praise of bastards: the uncertainties of mestizo identity in the sixteenth- and 77
seventeenth-century Andes
Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne

Part III The complicity of religion and state

7Living their lives in courts: the counter-hegemonic force of the Tswana kgotla in 98
a colonial context
Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
8 A public flogging in south-western Iran: juridical rule, abolition of legality and 122
local resistance
Manuchehr Sanadjian
9Which centre, whose margin? Notes towards an archaeology of US Supreme 144
Court Case 91–948, 1993 (Church of the Lukumí vs. City of Hialeah, South

Florida)
Stephan Palmié

Index 175
Contributors
Ray Abrahams, University Lecturer in Anthropology and Fellow of Churchill College,
University of Cambridge, is especially interested in rural society in its relation to the
state. He has done fieldwork in Tanzania and Uganda, Estonia and Finland. Among his
publications are Nyamwezi Today (1981) and A Place of their Own (1991) and, as
editor, Barons and Farmers in Estonia (1994) and Witchcraft in Contemporary
Tanzania (1994).
Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne is the author of La Indentidad aymara (1987) and of other
studies on Aymara and Pukina ethnohistory, as well as on Andean religions. She is
Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and at
the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L’Amérique Latine.
Sophie Day, who is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of
London, has done fieldwork in Ladakh and London and has a special interest in
medical anthropology.
Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex. She also
holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology and has done fieldwork in Belgium. She has
particular interests in law, human rights, identity, colonialism and memory.
Sue Fleming, of the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, has
done fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Mozambique. Central to her
interests are problems of Third World development.
Ørnulf Gulbrandsen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bergen. To his
earlier work in industrial anthropology, he has added an interest in cultural ecology,
kinship and politics. His fieldwork among the Tswana of South Africa has yielded a
number of publications, including Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: Socio-Economic
Marginalization, Ecological Deterioration and Political Stability in a Tswana Society
(1994).
Olivia Harris has researched and published widely on the Andean region. She is Reader
in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Visiting Professor
in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.
Stephan Palmié teaches at the Amerika-Institut of the University of Munich. He has
carried out research in the USA, Cuba and Jamaica, and has taught in the Carter
G.Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia.
Manuchehr Sanadjian is an Iranian anthropologist living in the UK.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Signe Howell for inviting me to convene a session on law for the 3rd
EAS A Conference in Oslo, and thus encouraging me to pursue a new line of thought,
and to all those who participated in the session, in particular those who presented papers.
My thanks also to the British Academy for a travel grant that enabled me to attend the
conference.
At the time I started work on editing the papers for publication I little thought that the
editorial process would be delayed by my own encounters with the law. In the event, the
Introduction had to be written in La Paz (Bolivia), without access to bibliographic
resources, in the midst of unplanned ‘fieldwork’. My inadvertent participant observation
of legal processes, in which I found myself on the one hand ambiguously ‘inside and
outside the law’, and on the other working with lawyers to reformulate a particular statute
which has effectively excluded many ethnic groups in Bolivia from acquiring legal status,
have provided many insights. For these I thank my daughter Marina, and colleagues in
the National Secretariats of Ethnic Affairs and Popular Participation, Bolivia.
In these unpropitious circumstances Heather Gibson at Routledge, and Roger
Goodman of EASA, have acted with exemplary patience and understanding. Harry
Lubasz made a major contribution in revising the translation of Chapter 6 and Vanessa
Fleming formatted most of the chapters. My warmest thanks to all of them.