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As an important contribution to debates on property theory and the role of law in creating, disputing, defining and refining property rights, this volume provides new theoretical material on property systems, as well as new empirically grounded case studies of the dynamics of property transformations. The property claimants discussed in these papers represent a diverse range of actors, including post-socialist states and their citizens, those receiving restitution for past property losses in Africa, Southeast Asia and in eastern Europe, collectives, corporate and individual actors. The volume thus provides a comprehensive anthropological analysis not only of property structures and ideologies, but also of property (and its politics) in action.
How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.
Demonstrating how users of law, who often operate in multi-sited situations, are forced to deal with increasingly complex legal circumstances, this volume focuses on political and social processes through which people appropriate, use and create legal forms in multiple legal settings. It provides new insights into social and political processes through which transnational law is locally appropriated by different actors and presents empirical studies of confrontation, adaptation, vernacularization and hybridization of law due to its transplantation across the borders of national states. The contributors offer insights into modern dynamics of legal change, challenging assumptions about increasing homogeneity in law, with a keen eye for the historical situations in which current legal changes stand.
This book deals with the property and inheritance system of the matrilineal Minangkabau of West Sumatra in the context of legal pluralism. The author proposes a new anthropological approach to law, property and inheritance. After the description of the Minangkabau socio-political organization and the development of legal and administrative pluralism, three chapters are devoted to property and inheritance proper. First the ideal legal systems are described. Then he illustrates how the Minangkabau actually handle their property and inheritance affairs, and how the various regulating mechanisms have changed through history. Finally the different agents creating and changing legal conceptions ar...
This book explores the relationships between matrilineal, Islamic and state law, and investigates the dynamics of legal pluralism, governance and property relationships.
Recoge: Power of law as discourse - At the intersection of legalities - Religion as a resource in legal pluralism.
Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society focuses on law and its location, exploring how spaces are constructed on the terrestrial and marine surface of the earth with legal means in a rich variety of socio-political, legal and ecological settings. The contributors explore the interrelations between social spaces and physical space, highlighting the ways in which legal rules may localise people's rights and obligations in social space that may be mapped onto physical space. This volume also demonstrates how different notions of space and place become resources that can be mobilised in social, political and economic interaction, paying specific attention to the contradictory ways in which space may be configured and involved in social interaction under conditions of plural legal orders. Spatializing Law makes a significant contribution to the anthropological geography of law and will be useful to scholars across a broad array of disciplines.
Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest.
How are time-honored tenets of faith, different ritual sensibilities, and newly emerging eschatological imaginaries articulated with other normative registers and moral susceptibilities in disputes? This book examines such questions through cases in Europe, the United States, Israel, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.
Ten diverse ethnographic case studies renew the anthropological perspective on property.