Author ORCID Identifier
Deepa Das Acevedo 0000-0001-7836-4072
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Keywords
Anthropology of law, Law-in-context, Law and society, Methodology, Religious life and legal systems, Legal anthropology of India, Interdisciplinarity
Abstract
This Article reviews and analyses scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and law. The first half of the Article provides context for understanding the boundaries, animating concerns, and tensions that have characterised the anthropology of law as an area of interdisciplinary inquiry. We focus especially on the subdiscipline’s Anglo-American history and show how a promising early period of engagement dissipated as both anthropologists and legal scholars lost enthusiasm for each others’ insights and methods. Then, we expand our analysis outward. Because legal anthropology belongs within, and is increasingly attentive to, the broader field of law and society scholarship, we explore the relationship between both areas of interdisciplinary study. In the second half of the Article, we narrow our focus geographically by identifying key themes and analytical approaches in the work of anthropologists studying law in India. We explore five broadly defined topics that have garnered significant attention in recent scholarship: religion, gender, criminality, governance and state power, and legal documents. As we show, the anthropology of law in India has not been defined by the same waning interest in formal law that came to define its late twentieth-century Anglo-American counterpart. This half of the Article goes on to explore anthropological scholarship published in the Socio-Legal Review, highlighting key works and discussing their methodological and theoretical approaches. Finally, the Article concludes by considering three key questions concerning the future of legal anthropology.
First Page
25
Publication Title
Socio-Legal Review
Recommended Citation
Deepa Das Acevedo & Jahnavi Chamarthi, Cultivating Attentiveness to Law in India through Legal Anthropology, 20 Socio-Legal Rev. 25 (2024).
Included in
Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, Other Legal Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
Comments
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.