Research Catalog

Title

Inside and outside the law : anthropological studies of authority and ambiguity / edited by Olivia Harris.

Publication

London ; New York : Routledge, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Harris, Olivia.
• European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Description

viii, 218 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

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 Law reflects 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 Law will 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.

Series Statement

European Association of Social Anthropologists

Uniform Title

European Association of Social Anthropologists (Series)

Subject

• Law and anthropology
• Culture and law

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

1. Introduction: inside and outside the law / Olivia Harris -- 2. Human rights talk and anthropological ambivalence: the particular context of universal claims / Marie-Benedicte Dembour -- 3. Vigilantism: order and disorder on the frontiers of the state / Ray Abrahams -- 4. Trading in ambiguity: law, rights and realities in the distribution of land in northern Mozambique / Sue Fleming -- 5. The law and the market: rhetorics of exclusion and inclusion among London prostitutes / Sophie Day -- 6. In praise of bastards: the uncertainties of mestizo identity in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes / Therese Bouysse-Cassagne.

ISBN

• 0415129281 (cloth)
• 041512929X (pbk.)

LCCN

^^^96021564^

OCLC

• 34658896
• SCSB-9970108

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library