Reflections on the Anthropology of Law, Governance and Sovereignty

Abstract

This chapter begins with the three cardinal directions: the fetishism of the law; ID-ology; and anthropological criminology. Protagonists of the sovereignty of tradition have invoked the 'justifiable' and 'democratic' limitation in their struggles with the state. It was written originally as a Keynote Lecture to a conference on 'Law and Governance' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, in November 2006. The global effect is not unusual any more to hear the Euro-language of jurisprudence in the Amazon or Aboriginal Australia. 'Lawmaking', said Benjamin, is 'power making'. South Africa, being a post colony, was erected from the first on difference. Like most other places, it has seen a significant shift in the dialectic of law and governance. Here as elsewhere, neoliberalism has emerged triumphant, its language spoken as a national vernacular, albeit not without challenge.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.