ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Paul Dresch addresses the issue of equality, hierarchy, and the status of rules in a historico-anthropological perspective. Anthropologists have written on hierarchy and equality, holism, and individualism, often not distinguishing the first opposition from the second. The questions that arise involve value and morality. Many involve explicit rules of the kind that law trades in, and thus involve explicit categories. The force of the rule here lies less in its manipulation than in its seeming objectivity and its promise, beyond passing contingencies, of a reasonable life. “Treat like cases alike (and different cases differently)” is an easy principle. But no cases are quite alike. Much debate concerns which differences matter. The problems run deeper. Even displacing equality of outcomes with equality of opportunity leaves us in bind, for we cannot start equal in society as it presently exists. Whether to maintain society or reform it, we turn to government. The “holistic individualism” of State and citizen then threatens an unwanted uniformity. Escaping the bind requires, as Justin Schwartz argued, recognising different scales of value, such that wealth and honour might be distinguished, or rank and power. This, in turn, requires further rules. A comparison between nineteenth-century European liberalism and Yemeni tribalism sheds light on rule-bound alternatives to tyranny. In passing, it shows that the idea of law without centralised coercion makes sense and that rules need not serve only instrumental ends.
