Paper short abstract:

What do laws mean? I use the interpretative challenge of a Tibetan legal code to ask who makes laws and why. This means paying attention to the lawmakers' ideals and aspirations, rather than assuming practical goals. The fruitfulness of this approach is discussed by comparing other historic laws.

Paper long abstract:

What do laws mean? This paper starts with the interpretative challenge of a legal code produced by nomadic pastoralists in eastern Tibet in the early twentieth century. Looking beyond contemporary explanations, I ask about who made it and their wider purposes and aspirations. This suggests reading apparently practical rules about compensation as exemplary statements about justice, tribal autonomy, and participation in a wider Buddhist world, rather than assuming that the texts were intended as practical forms of regulation and control. The fruitfulness of this approach is emphasized, in this presentation, by comparison with other historic legal texts, which have been studied by scholars working in very different contexts. These include the detailed, esoteric, and profuse laws created in medieval Ireland and Iceland, laws which took religious forms in apparently impractical ways in sub-Saharan Africa, and documents recording slavery transactions in medieval Dubrovnik and central Tibet which seem to have denied the reality of the underlying transactions. In each case, I suggest, the apparent purposes of the laws mask deeper ambitions and considerations, which can only be grasped by asking seriously about who the lawmakers were and what they may have been trying to achieve. In this presentation I discuss the challenges of this approach and the limits of the work of interpretation.