Paper Short Abstract:

Legal anthropology finds itself in a double bind: we seek both to distance ourselves from Eurocentric legal concepts and instead centre our work on emic notions of justice, and to find a common language with legal scholars and practitioners who deploy the law onto the social groups we work with.

Paper Abstract:

My intervention to this Roundtable seeks to reckon with the double bind that legal anthropology finds itself in: on the one hand, we seek to displace Eurocentric legal assumptions from our analyses and instead to engage with the notions of justice espoused by the people with whom we conduct our research. On the other hand, we aim for wider political relevance, especially among legal practitioners, even as our analyses question their assumptions. The first challenge is compounded by the fact that the people in the field might conflate law and moralities, especially when it comes to vernacular justice. I will exemplify this conundrum through my experience at a workshop on the topic of arranged marriages with judges from across Europe as part of a wider European Judicial Training Network conference. One of the debates was, for instance, whether matrimonial exchanges constitute a transaction, and if so, then is the spouse ‘sold’ into marriage? Moreover, is not the role of the legal system to prevent such transactions and ‘save’ young women from such marriages? The answers to these questions were anything but straightforward, but I’d like to argue that such debates, while uneasy, enable us to reflect on the two distinct emic notions of justice that shape our analyses, i.e., those of our research participants and those of legal practitioners who regulate their lives, and, further, on how we might render these notions mutually intelligible while also 'decolonizing' the field along with our analytical practices.