Political and Legal Anthropology

Although FASD is first and foremost a health issue, it is a consideration in the justice system because individuals with FASD have contact as victims, witnesses and offenders. This chapter will draw on research with justice professionals to argue that there is an ethical need, and indeed an obligation, for appropriate training to better prepare police to work with clients that have FASD. By illustrating the ways in which many frontline workers misunderstand FASD, coupled with the stigma associated to FASD, this chapter argues that individuals with FASD have unique needs and the stakes in the justice system are simply too high to not have appropriate training in place to meet those needs.

Debates over citizenship not only restage the challenges of citizenship for queer/trans subjects, but also reanimate the nettlesome relationship between proof and queerness. Queer kinship and intimacies, disidentifications with normative gender, and relationships that eschew reproductive, normative, or caste networks are challenges to represent in the technical languages of bureaucracy and documentation. Queerness rarely lives in the concrete boundaries of representable and visible documentation.

[From the cover]:

In Writing Authority, Hawke argues that the rapidly changing political and economic landscape of early Greece prompted elites to begin committing laws to written form. The emergence of the polis and its institutions, the demographic growth of Greece, the development of market forces and the commoditization of wealth, all presented new challenges and difficulties for the Greeks of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Hawke contends that no one felt the attendant anxieties of these changes more acutely than the leading members of early Greek communities—they confronted regulating their intense competition for status and power in an environment where traditional sources of authority, such as Homeric epic, offered no ready solutions for problems arising from the transformation of Greek society. Greek elites enshrined in writing rules aimed at stabilizing their relationships with one another and, by extension, their communities.

Challenging both established and emerging orthodoxies about the appearance of written law in ancient Greece, Writing Authority questions the importance of a popular or communal role in the earliest Greek legislation. Approaches from anthropology, legal studies, and sociology are used to situate the emergence of Greek law in the broader context of Greek legal culture in the eighth through early sixth centuries B.C.E. as Hawke describes in rich detail the legal culture of Homer’s world, considers the impact of literacy on Greek attitudes about law and authority and its practical consequences for the governing of the Greek polis, and examines the effects of the tumultuous changes in Archaic Greece on the leading members of Greek communities. The result is a compelling monograph that provides an exhaustive and nuanced history of earliest Greek law and the motivations of the elites that brought it into being. It will be of interest to scholars of Greek history, classicists, and early legal historians.

In December 2015, Germany implemented its first official law regulating organized assistance to suicide. Prior to the imple- mentation of the §217 of the criminal code, assisted suicide was already regulated by 18 different sets of mutually contra- dictory medical norms, but despite their coexistence within the federal jurisdiction, these norms did not overlap at state level and were binding only to registered members of each medical association. After the implementation of the §217 StGB, however, the new legal pluralism on assisted suicide turned into one of overlaps, where medical norms and official law were oftentimes on opposing sides. This new plural legal landscape became a source of doubts and suspicions for those involved with assisted suicide on the ground level, shrouding assisted suicide with an affective perception of illegality and making the state be perceived through a general sense of mistrust and uncertainty. In this sense, this article first presents the production of a new legal pluralism on assisted suicide following the implementation of the §217 StGB to, subse- quently, discuss how this legal landscape obscured the ques- tion of legality by enhancing uncertainties on the ground level and constituting an affective mode of governance.

With the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994, the struggle of indigenous Griqua for land has gained new momentum. Having lost most of their ancestral land in the 19th century due to colonialism, Griqua people are now using new legal opportunities to reclaim land. On their reobtained land Griqua people dwell, farm, celebrate indigenous festivals and create cultural villages for tourists. In doing so, Griqua people are currently contributing to the making of Ethnicity, Inc., the double process of commodification of culture and creation of ethnic businesses.
The pdf is an excerpt of the book which comprises the contents, the introduction, chapter 4 and 9.

Cette contribution présente le cours sur les institutions primitives dispensé par l’historien du droit Jacques Flach au Collège de France entre 1892 et 1904. Elle insiste sur la singularité de son approche historique et comparative. Soucieux d’étudier les institutions en contexte, il propose une interprétation inédite de la féodalité, ambitionne d’écrire une histoire globale du droit et cherche à restituer l’altérité institutionnelle des sociétés primitives. Flach est ainsi l’un des premiers à enseigner en France l’anthropologie sociale et juridique.

In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of organized power in organizing complex and unequal societies.  This article reviews the development of bureaucracy studies, focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats in their efforts to control the actions of others.  Then the central concept of thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels and relationships of power, with particular attention to the encompassing classifications and assumptions embodied in organizational worldviews.  The worldview of officers of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective perpetuation of undocumented labor migration.  Human rights abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes of these thought-work routines.  A stronger theoretical approach to organized power enhances applied anthropology's ability to address the behavior of state and private bureaucracies with respect to the rights and interests of nonbureaucrats.

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling offers a comprehensive survey of interdisciplinary research related to smuggling, reflecting on key themes, and charting current and future trends. Divided into six parts and spanning over 30 chapters, the volume covers themes such as mobility, borders, violent conflict, and state politics, as well as looks at the smuggling of specific goods-from rice and gasoline to wildlife, weapons, and cocaine. Chapters engage with some of the most contentious academic and policy debates of the twenty-first century, including the historical creation of borders, re-bordering, the criminalisation of migration, and the politics of selective toleration of smuggling. As it maps a field that contains unique methodological, ethical, and risk-related challenges, the book takes stock not only of the state of our shared knowledge, but also reflects on how this has been produced, pointing to blind spots and providing an informed vision of the future of the field. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of conflict studies, borderland studies, criminology, political science, global development, anthropology, sociology, and geography.

In this paper I challenge the concept of 'transition to democracy' ideology that led to the policy of the 1990s. I lean especially on forest land allotment, revealing both the intricacies of this process and its effects. In Romania, the property regime has a complex tradition, given the fragmented nature of the various entities that made up the Romanian state in 1918, and specific associative property forms, such as joint property, compossessorates, border guards' forests and communal forests. The situation is even more complicated due to environmental issues because forests, regardless of ownership, can be viewed as an issue of national security. I argue that, even at the discursive level the interwar period was taken as a benchmark, the complications of restitution process, communist legacy imprinted on public policy and the new configuration of actors involved in the process, all worked together on setting a unique system of property usage and ownership.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Hyrje Në këtë punim do të paraqiten në mënyrë të përmbledhur studimet etnografike të realizuara në zonën kufitare Shqipëri-Kosovë nga viti 2002 e në vijim. Qëllimi kryesor është rishikimi i punës së deritanishme dhe shpalosja e disa tezave dhe ideve për projektet në vijim. Vëmendje më specifike do t'i kushtohet raportit të marrëdhënieve të pronësisë dhe se si këto marrëdhënie u zhvilluan në mes sistemeve të ndryshme ligjore, duke u mbështetur në kërkimin etnografik, ushtruar kryesisht në zonën kufitare, duke risjellë për diskutim zhvillimin e së drejtës si pjesë e kulturës dhe politikave shtetërore në dy shoqëri në tranzicion, ose, thënë ndryshe, dy shoqëri që kanë përjetuar kolektivisht kalimin nëpër faza të ndryshme politike, ideologjike. Kësodore, do të theksohen projektet mbi kushtin politik të të jetuarit "nëpër faza kalimtare", të një shoqërie të ikjes dhe shtetit që braktis për shkak të dështimeve të ushtrimit të autoritetit shtetëror, ose për shkaqe të zbatimit të një modeli qeverisës bazuar te një ideologji neoliberale, ose një kombinim i praktikave të dështimit shtetëror me një ideologji që, krahas promovimit të shtetit të vogël, bëhet edhe vjegë e justifikimeve të dështimeve politike. Shqyrtimi bëhet duke mbajtur në vëmendje trashëgiminë dhe kujtesën sociale të një shteti, që kërkonte të ndërtonte njeriun dhe shoqërinë e re si dhe tendencave të shtetit për t'u rikthyer herë pas here në marrjen e territoreve ligjore. Ndryshe nga herët e tjera, këtu do të shtohet, pak më tej, një gjini e etnografisë, që njihet si auto-etnografi, me qëllim për të shtuar një sens të refleksivitetit në këtë punë dhe për punët e kryera më parë.

Based on the objectives of this ethnography, the pursuit of this study wants to contribute to a better understanding of the Philippines strategic culture in its continuing battle to protect its territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea.

The research has looked at the plausible approaches in contributing to the epistemic literature of the anthropology of security by examining the country’s strategic culture in the West Philippine Sea, identifying themes on the Philippines strategic culture in its imminent external security threat, and to recommend projected Philippines responses to advance the country’s strategic culture.

Based on the findings of the ethnography, China has already risen economically, militarily and politically. The pronounced power shift in the West Philippine Sea, two superpowers, one emerging (China) while the other declining (United States), are tossing coins with each other as they flex military muscles in the new-found maritime battleground at the expense of smaller nation like the Philippines, ascribing and still trying to identify and institutionalize its own strategic culture.

In-depth analyses and rhetoric sandwiched in this ethnographic account identified legal remedies, diplomatic negotiations, and military alliance as part of building the capacity to foster the country’s robust strategic culture.

It is obvious that although the country manifests strategic culture, it is still episodic and not well-defined or long-term, although it is not lacking as accounted in the oral traditions of Philippine strategic culture, but it only needs to be codified, defined, and institutionalized to empower its existence and robustness. This is perhaps the silverlining in the West Philippine Sea crisis that has jolted the Philippine defense establishment out of stupor.

"Antropologji e kanunit" paraqet dhe problematizon debatin teorik në dijet sociale e humane, kryesisht në antropologjinë e së drejtës. Qëllimi i këtij përvijimi teorik është vënia në pah e mënyrave se si qasjet e ndryshme teroike në lëmin e së drejtës, e kryesisht në antropologjinë e së drejtës kanë krijuar mastarët e tyre teorik e se si konkretisht kanë 'matur' njeriun e njerëzoren të tjetri e të vetja. "Matjet teorike" herë nëpër lente relativiste e herë universaliste, e herë-herë të ndërkallura në mes tyre, janë krijuar nëpër troje specifike pushteti. Prandaj si për teorinë ashtu dhe për kulturën e shoqërinë, është parë me vend marrja në shqyrtim e raporteve të pushtetit. Duke u fokusuar te kanuni, e drejta zakonore, autori shqyrton raportet pushtet - dije në mendimin antropologjik, përthyerjen e këtij raporti në jetën e përditshme, kushtin e pluralizmit ligjor, regjimet hierarkike mes rendeve të ndryshme ligjore, kuptime e së drejtës dhe drejtësisë, duke vënë në qendër raportet komplekse mes të drejtës kanunore dhe asaj shtetërore. Gjakmarrja, martesa dhe prona, janë tri çështjet rreth të cilave lëvrohet teza e liminalizimit të kulturës prej shtetërores. Libri mbyllet me ftesën për të parë se si shtetërorja moderne përdor kulturën apo aspekte të saj, për të klasifikuar njeriun si jo-krejt-njeri dhe se si, ajo i jep për atribut vetvetes, shndërrimin e jo-krejt-njeriut, në, më në fund, njeri.

Hobbes’s political philosophy starts from a number of premises that are supposed to be self-evident, supplemented by various observations from experience. These statements are examined critically and in their interrelatedness in order to find out to what extent Hobbes provides a convincing system of thought. The importance of the basis of man’s actions, his self-interest, is inquired, since it serves as the basis of his practical philosophy. After this, Hobbes’s views on ‘moral’ notions are expounded. As it turns out, Hobbes maintains a number of concepts that have such a connotation, but interprets these in a specific way. The article is concluded with a modest systematic reconstruction of Hobbes’s main thoughts in practical philosophy.

First, I examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), I show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, I question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy.

Keywords : Melancholy – Skepticism – Law – Discipline – Elizabethan drama – Shakespeare – Walter Benjamin – Carl Schmitt – Hobbes – Leviathan – Behemoth

What is legitimacy, and what does narrative have to do with it? “Legitimacy” might be the most commonly used word in all of ancient Near Eastern political history writing, but its premises have been woefully undertheorized. What follows will, perhaps predictably, quibble over the meaning of a word which is important to many of the papers in this and many other books. But rather than just kibitz over a term and muddy the waters, my goal is to elucidate how narrativity produced political authority through “validity.” I will argue that we ought to use the term “validity” to refer to the concepts of wholeness and cogency of political authority that narrativity creates, rather than the rule-bound criteria that “legitimacy” suggests.

The task to reshape governments in the countries confronted with the Arab Spring prompts the question whether there are necessary conditions to realize a stable society that simultaneously seeks to eliminate the elements that have led to the uprisings. Acknowledging some constitutional rights seems indispensable in such a process. I argue that such a state of affairs is indeed the case, at least now that the ‘old’ justifications to differentiate between people do not suffice anymore. That is not to say that the countries involved will have identical laws in each respect, but merely that a common basis has to be realized, manifested in political and legal equality, so this given does not derogate from the fact that each country’s specific legislation needs to be shaped in the light of its own history. Such a basis has no ‘moral’ character, but is simply a necessary condition to prevent sedition.

This article investigates the evolution of political systems in North-Eastern Yemen in the course of the last two millennia. By examining the main shifts of political power and their structural elements, it describes a typology of socio-political and economic formation that was particular to the Yemeni Highlands and that has been designated as ‘multi-polity’. The study concludes that a North Yemeni type of tribe is a non-primitive and highly developed political structure, which may be considered in some respects as an alternative to state organization.

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Local-Space-Global-Life-International/dp/1107092124

Communal democracy is shown to be significantly and negatively
correlated with polygyny. In turn, communal democracy is demonstrated
to be positively correlated with the democracy of supracommunal
structures. Consequently, it is suggested that the fact that
modern democracy developed in Europe (i.e. the very region that by
the Late Middle Ages was already characterized by the highest proportion of complex societies with small monogamous families and
democratic communities) might not be a coincidence.

In this paper, I discuss the relevance of indigenous normativity in advocating a deliberative yet autonomous political institution of the Gran d Cordillera. I develop what I call 'normative intercultural discourse ,' which attempts to integrate indigenous normative approaches and deliberative theory judiciously, without eliminating the distinctive character of each. In my opinion, this procedure can forge a shared understanding in the direction of the proposed Cordillera autonomous region. It can open the possibility for a stronger Cordillera polity which reflects the Cordilleran aspiration to determining its economic, political, and social affairs.

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have highlighted the presence of urban informality in the Global North. Although we applaud this development, we deplore that this body of literature is characterized by analytical ambiguity and fragmented discussions. More specifically, the literature often reduces or repudiates the political potential of urban informality by (a) integrating it into the formal, (b) mobilizing it for policy purposes, and/or (c) designating it as a "policy problem." In this article, we examine the existing literature and rethink the concept of urban informality by discussing it in relation to Jacques Rancière's distinction between "police" and "politics." This distinction enables us to highlight the political potential of urban informality in the Global North.

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations, and of the concept of "politics" more broadly

What would it mean to think of political transitions through the concept of liminality? Liminality as advanced in cultural anthropology refers to the middle stage and consequent positioning of subjects in transition between socially established categories. Comparative Politics and International Relations (IR) tend to focus on states in transit, generally understanding politics through an institutionalist lens and thus lacking the depth of the internal meanings of transition as experienced by the communities and people in question. This chapter critiques the narrow transition paradigm in the study of international politics. Accordingly, it applies the optic of liminality in order to reorient the thinking of politics in the moment of transition via two examples, that is, transitional justice and the transformation of contemporary warfare. Russia's idiosyncratic policies of reckoning with the violent legacies of its predecessor, the USSR, and its ongoing engagement in the war in Ukraine serve as illustrations of both lines of inquiry pursued here. Liminality, transitions and the politics therein

A pdf is available upon request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  Lays out a fundamental groundwork for the study of the interplay of states and illegal practices.  Rather than thinking of state legality and illegal practices as polar opposites, we approach them with an open inquiry as to their mutual constitution, interactions, and in some cases interpenetration.  The role of illegal practices in capital accumulation is also considered.

The most comprehensive treatment of the concept of legal pluralism is John Griffiths's essay, published in 1986. However the concept's origin dates back to the colonial period when Western law appeared to be opposed to, or at least to be identified against, indigenous law. Here the idea of law was used inappropriately and often misleadingly to impose a monological and temporarily linear frame on the normative understandings of diverse and sometimes stateless societies. More recently, the concept of legal pluralism has been applied to Western societies and their multicultural and urban environments, but the term's analytical foundation remains weak and unstable.

This chapter introduces an anthropological inquiry into human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, and proposes taking an ethnographic approach grounded in love, agency, and humanity to do so. Such an inquiry brings together queer anthropology and the anthro pology of human rights to analyse the intersection of human rights and social justice ac tivism for people with non-normative sexualities and genders. Although queer anthropolo gy has illuminated the contingent and multiple ways of doing sexuality and gender, it usu ally does not examine the processes and patterns that arise out of human rights or the ac tions and experiences of activists. On the other hand, anthropologists of human rights have generally not focused on non-normative genders or sexualities. The proposed ethno graphic approach does not merely pay attention to the interpretation, adaptation, and cir culation of the substantive meanings of human rights and such affiliated identities as les bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT); it also analyses the emotions and interper sonal relations that give rise to and emerge from those processes and treats them as in herent to the practices of human rights and LGBT identities. Additionally, this approach is motivated by compassion for the agency and empirical realities of their research subjects. Taking this approach to develop research at the intersection of human rights activism, sexuality, and gender, the field of anthropology can further influence theories of social movements and collective action in the broader social sciences.