Paper short abstract:

This paper considers legal otherness as a paradoxical means for negotiating self-determination and sovereignty in the context of ethnographic inquiries. 'Self-determination' as a dimension of the emerging modernity may be traced in various projections on the ethnographic studies of law.

Paper long abstract:

Besides the twentieth century´s anthropology of law, legal alterity or otherness have long tended to be relegated beyond the field of legitimate folkloristic and ethnographic concern. The cliché of this disciplinary genesis is being undermined by a rediscovery of Jacob Grimm´s and others´ studies of legal otherness as a distinctive field of folkloristic and ethnographic study that preceded modern legal anthropology. Drawing on their ethnographic achievements, this paper considers legal otherness as a fundamental yet paradoxical means for negotiating the self-determination and sovereignty of emerging nations. On the one hand, legal otherness entails distinctive forms of legal authorities in specific types of local practices, which may be taken up in order to draw attention to the particular legal cultures and distinctively composite nature of non-state political units such as kingdoms, regions, or tribes. On the other, it increasingly features the processes of modernisation, nationalisation and democratisation of originally agrarian cultures across the territories marked as modern nations. In view of this, what forms of self-determination were supported or undermined by found and described legal alterities, and how might these in turn shape ethnographic and folkloristic studies of law? 'Self-determination/sovereignty' can be traced in the ethnographic and folkloristic studies of 'legal otherness'— juristic folklore, non-state law, customs, and law-ways —within which scholars have entangled ethnography, history, and the archaeology of law with various political projects (democratisation, nationalisation, historicization).