Introduction: internationalizing custom and localizing law

Abstract

This symposium is an endeavor to re-evaluate and update what may at first blush appear to be a thoroughly old-fashioned or folkloristic set of ideas for anthropologists: the concept of custom, particularly as it is deployed in relation to the concept of law. The presumed shrinking of the contemporary world has had interesting and documentable implications for the anthropology of law. Throughout the twentieth century, much of the energy of this subdiscipline was concentrated in finding practices that looked like law in societies that were presumed either to have no law or to be subject to legal regimes that were deemed alien to the principles of Euro-American jurisprudence, that is, religious, tribal, or “customary law.” Much of the development of legal anthropology, and the early theoretical debates within it, had to do with exploring the limits of this analogy between custom and law. Decolonization saw a shift away from these debates, as they seemed very much of their time and place in the late years of the colonial period.