Paper Short Abstract:

I share insights from feminist anthropology, including Strathern’s 1987 “awkward relationship” analysis, and my 40 years of research with self-identified Maasai communities in Tanzania, to explore the challenges and limits of decoloniality for “engaged” forms of legal anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

Both “engaged” anthropology and calls to “decolonize” the field have longer histories that trace and reflect different (and sometimes competing) priorities, purposes, forms of knowledge creation, ethnographic modalities, and power relations. Recent (actually, renewed) mandates to “decolonize” the discipline of anthropology both complement and challenge some of the premises of engaged modes of anthropological research and scholarship, including the positionings of the researcher, relationships between the anthropologist and the communities with whom they work, preferred (even possible) ethnographic methods, theories of knowledge production, and forms of scholarly communication.

The tensions between calls to “engage” and “decolonize” are especially heightened in the subfield of legal anthropology, with its focus on rights and justice, power disparities, forms of advocacy and activism, the creation and contestation of norms, law as a weapon used by and against marginalized social groups, and other topics central to our comparative understanding of how power, difference, and justice function in the world.

I highlight these productive tensions and propose some theoretical and methodological ways forward, by drawing on insights from feminist anthropology (including Marilyn Strathern’s somewhat dated but still prescient analysis of the “awkward relationship” between feminism and anthropology) and experiences from my almost 40 years of research with self-identified Maasai communities in Tanzania, especially two recent legal anthropology book projects on indigenous advocacy and gender justice.