ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the conceptual framework underpinning the editors’ approach to law and anthropology. The first step lies in defining ‘law and anthropology’ as an interdisciplinary encounter characterised by a conscious choice among legal scholars, legal practitioners, and anthropologists to speak to and learn from each other as intellectual peers. As a second step, this volume, as a whole, privileges multi-perspectivity and multi-sitedness, but also situated knowledge production, over the reproduction of a single dominant narrative. Giving the word ‘leading’ a subjective and autobiographical twist, this book includes a variety of voices, experiences, and perspectives, while at the same time acknowledging the analytical possibilities and constraints deriving from the contributors’ situatedness in specific academic or field contexts and their movements across sites. Finally, the third move consists of making formal state and international legal systems the analytical starting point for the encounter between anthropological and legal scholarship and for revisiting the longstanding anthropological reflex to challenge state-centric notions of law from this point of departure. In addition to underpinning this volume's unfolding, these conceptual moves speak to ongoing conversations on what law is, shifting identities of ‘law and anthropology’ research, the plural nature of engagements between law and anthropology, and interdisciplinary legal research more broadly.
