Law, Society, Power: Contemporary Anthropological Issues

Catalog description

This graduate seminar critically engages the field of anthropology of law, exploring law not as an autonomous system of rules, but as a complex domain of power, knowledge production, and social practice that is deeply interwoven with social life. Moving beyond foundational legal-anthropological texts, we will treat the history of the discipline’s engagement with law as a historically situated project that actively shapes and legitimizes legal practices and ideas. The seminar explores how the anthropological study of law continues to expand and unfold capaciously in contemporary scholarship, with a specific focus on "anthropologies of law" emerging from and beyond the formal discipline. We will dedicate rigorous critical analysis to developing advanced anthropological approaches, emphasizing tools to interrogate law's authority and its constitutive relationships with key historical and ideological formations. A central focus is to disrupt the assumption that law is separate from or merely the inverse of certain social concepts, compelling us to investigate law's entwinement with liberalism, capitalism, violence, and justice. The course explores law through its varied instantiations as language, discourse, social technology, and materiality, using contemporary ethnographic work to situate the discipline's own history in relation to legal power. This seminar is designed for graduate students interested in contemporary theory, ethnographic methods, and advanced research on legal and judicial systems, aiming to foster critical and analytical skills necessary to reimagine the problem-space of law/anthropology.