ABSTRACT
The influence of the German historical school in law, with its emphasis on law as the product of culturally patterned reactions to historical processes, marked out the territory on which historians and anthropologists now meet each other. Law is, in all societies, one of the most explicit, concrete and institutionalised cadres of ethno-socioiogicai discourse. The equation between the codified law of literate societies and the unwritten 'rules' discovered by the anthropologist was facilitated by developments within legal theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which built on the bourgeois opposition between the state and 'civil society'. Anthropologists arrived at a more critical attitude towards the relation between law and social structure only through a slow process. Anthropologists of the Manchester school also challenged the assumption that colonial governments applying an 'indirect rule' policy were allowing customary law to continue to function unchanged.
