The editor of PoLAR, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, has circulated an email noting, of the latest issue:
In addition to the scholarly pieces and book reviews that you’ve come to expect from PoLAR, this issue features a special symposium on Transparency. The introduction, Transparency in Triads, by Andrea Ballestero S. nicely frames the collection of articles, explaining that they render “the dyad transparency/opacity into a triad by incorporating a series of third elements that reveal expected and unexpected bureaucratic, epistemological, and affective connections.”
Also,
if you go to PoLAR's website, http://www.polaronline.org/,
you'll see with this issue, we've featured a new postscript
by Chelsey L. Kivland, author of Unmaking
the State in "Occupied" Haiti.
In addition, the journal's issued a call for papers for a special issue on 'Internationalizing Custom and Localizing Law':
The
theme of this special issue 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
20th 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 precisely this custom/law analogy.
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.
The
project at the turn of the recent century changed due both to this shift in
focus and to
the migration of the concepts of law and custom out of the domains in which
they had
once formally been located. Anthropologists have moved from tracking analogies between
their own legal systems, and those of categorical others, to tracking the ways these
analogies have been appropriated by postcolonial governments, international courts
and treaties, and states debating over whether multiculturalism invigorates or
threatens the course of justice. Custom crops up periodically in such debates, sometimes
simply as a version of culture, at other times as a more nuanced category of
practices or social relationships, but nearly always as a marker of what people
deem to
be their patrimonial or authentic models for resolving disputes, ending
conflicts, and
staking claims.
Meanwhile,
mediation and disputing processes seen as emergent from such local regimes
are circulating in all manner of translocal contexts, such as the New Zealand Family
Group Conferences, themselves based on putatively Maori mediation techniques, and
adopted by restorative justice projects elsewhere in the Anglophone legal world.
The category of customary law may alternatively be revived, reinvented, or rediscovered
by new states asserting their originary distinctiveness from previous political
or cultural regimes. And to complicate the picture even further, international law
itself is acknowledged to be subject to its own “custom,” or corpus of
precedents on
which jurists and politicians working in a transnational context can draw, such
as the
laws of war.
It
is finally important to note that anthropologists no longer own the custom
concept. It
continues regularly to be enrolled, whether as customary, adat,
or tribal law, in the discourse
of law and policy practitioners throughout the postcolony and the Fourth World.
It may be regarded positively as a means of asserting nationhood or
culturebased claims,
or problematically as a hindrance to the universal applicability of a body of
national or international law. In either case the custom concept has not gone
away, and
it behooves anthropologists of law to attend to the concepts that our
interlocutors are
still using, and sometimes using in surprising contexts or to unanticipated
ends.
All
these influences serve to complicate the project of legal anthropology in
fruitful ways,
not least because they require anthropologists to attend to the ways in which their
own earlier attempts to localize law are now refracted back at them through the
prism of the apparently limitless capacity of law to adapt to, or be
appropriated into,
new contexts. This special issue therefore seeks to assess critically the project of
documenting local legal regimes or their movement through time and space, when the
very act of identifying them as local is what sets them in motion in a world in which
all “custom” is potentially universalizable, and all “law” potentially an
artifact of
cultural and temporal specificity.
Please
submit your articles and essays to us at PolarJournal@gmail.com
Articles received by January 15, 2013 will be
considered for this issue
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