| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: Anthropological and legal literatures often claim that the anthropology of law is a boundary discipline between social anthropology and legal studies. From this point of view, a sharp divide between law and culture is an indispensable prerequisite for any smooth interdisciplinary collaboration between social anthropologists and legal scholars as well as for combining ethnographic data with legal analyses. This paper, on the other hand, suggests that such joint efforts require a more sophisticated understanding of the mutual relationships between these disciplines and points to their entangled disciplinary beginnings. The social sciences, and social anthropology in particular, established their reflexive empirical methodologies and analytical systems by continually transcending the spatial and temporal boundaries of Western (legal) orthodoxy. Hence, the anthropology of law is seen as a distinctive scientific field, which views the law as an issue of the Other and whose definite theoretical and methodological attitudes are incompatible with both the ethnocentrism of conventional jurisprudence and the understanding of the Otherness in non-legal anthropology. |
