This issue
This issue of Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis contains five research articles, a meeting report, and four book reviews.
Shin-ichiro Ishida reports on the development of a collaborative project at the national museums of Kenya, focusing on the participatory documentation of the indigenous knowledge systems of the Amîîrû communities of the Kenyan central highlands. It discusses both opportunities for knowledge creation and sharing, and methodological challenges related to indigenous and legal essentialisms, with the ambition to bridge both essentialisms and the differences between methods based on generalised descriptions and on empirical case method.
Pan Mohamad Faiz and co-authors analyse how the Indonesian Constitutional Court has upheld legal pluralism through the noken system, a traditional voting model used in parts of Papua, eastern Indonesia. In this system tribal chiefs or community leaders vote on behalf of the entire local population. Although it deviates from the Indonesian Election Law, its constitutionality was guaranteed by the Indonesian Constitutional Court in 2009, though it “subsequently limited the constitutionality of implementing the noken system as Papuan society gradually transitions to the national electoral system.”
Tomáš Ledvinka and James M. Donovan explore academic and para-academic ethnographies of Afghanistan’s traditional justice system (jirgas and shuras) “in order to illuminate contrasts of their conceptual approaches at different periods of the country’s history.” Focusing on observations about the operation of various socio-legal authorities and drawing upon Pospisil’s legal-anthropological conceptual approach as an alternative to the use of binary oppositions, the authors develop both a non-dualistic understanding of Afghanistan’s traditional justice at the ethnographic micro-level, and renewed insights into Pospisil’s anthropological theory of law.
In an ethnographic study of mahallas (neighborhood communities) in Ferghana, Uzbekistan, Rustamjon Urinboyev discusses the legacy of Islamic legal culture in this post-Soviet country, which has become a peculiar blend of western and Soviet legal cultures, and Islamic legal culture. The author explores the legacy and context of this Islamic legal culture, arguing that moving from a state-centred understanding of law to an ethnographic analysis of everyday life and micro-level social processes and structures brings within view Islam as a functioning legal order in Uzbekistan.
Matthew Venker explores issues of legal personhood under British law in colonial Burma. While legal personhood was separated by religious status, boundaries of religious categories were unclear. This was, for instance, problematic in the application of Buddhist law between different Buddhist communities, like the Chinese and Burmese, in cases of marriage, divorce, succession and others. The author argues that this failure of the British colonial judiciary to deal with such boundary problems “produced novel legal segregations of mixed communities”, which also had gendered consequences.
In a meeting report, Zhou Yong and Brian Donahoe give a summary of an online roundtable discussion on law and anthropology in China, organised by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
This issue also contains book reviews by Abdullah Syamsul Arifin and co-authors, Moh. Ferdi Hasan, Kaden Paulson-Smith, and Rachel Sieder.
Types of publications in this journal
Special issues or sections, research articles and book reviews tend to fill the pages of this journal. There are, however, other options available. The meeting report published in this issue is an example of one of those alternative publication options. Others are review articles, brief reports, discussions, essays and interviews (see also the journal’s website). The editors welcome submissions of such diverse contributions, to stimulate debate and the sharing of experiences and ideas, to communicate tentative research insights, and thus create a more vibrant and diverse journal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).