ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how legal anthropology itself has developed among anthropologists, and on how the legal anthropological turn has come of age within the discipline of history in the time since Disputes and Settlements was published. It suggests some potential avenues for future research. An anthropological approach to law inquires into the context of enforceable norms: social, political, economic, and intellectual. From its inception, a central challenge for legal anthropology has been how to compare law in Western and non-Western societies. The response to legal anthropology's conceptual crisis at the beginning of the 1980s was the growth of legal pluralism. When Disputes and Settlements was published in 1983, there was a widespread understanding that disputes were the central theme of legal anthropology. The concept of legal culture has had more limited reception by historians, but when employed, studies have been quite successful, especially in shedding light on the development of the nascent state.
