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.
Custom Citation
Deepa Das Acevedo and Jahnavi Chamarthi, 'Cultivating Attentiveness to Law in India through Legal Anthropology' (2024) 20(2) Socio-Legal Review 25.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
doi.org/10.55496/MXOW2529
