Dr Mathijs Pelkmans, OLD 6.13 and Dr Fauzia Shariff, NAB 7.30

This course is compulsory for BA/BSc Social Anthropology and BA Anthropology and Law students. It is optional for LLB and LLF students. Also available to General Course students and as an outside option.

Undergraduates taking this course should have completed an introductory course in anthropology unless granted exemption by the course teacher.

The anthropological analysis of political and legal institutions as revealed in relevant theoretical debates and with reference to selected ethnography. The development of political and legal anthropology and their key concepts including forms of authority; forms of knowledge and power; political competition and conflict; colonial transformation of indigenous norms; writing legal ethnography of the 'other'; folk concepts of justice; the theory of legal pluralism; accommodation of religious practices in secular laws of European states.

Lectures AN226 weekly MT, LT. Classes AN226.A weekly MT, LT.

Students are expected to prepare discussion material for presentation in the classes. They will be given a course work mark on the basis of the presentations and written work based upon the presentations.

Gledhill, J 1994 Power and its Disguises; Leach, E 1954 The Political Systems of Highland Burma; Sharma, A and Gupta, A 2006 The Anthropology of the State; Verdery, K 1999  The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; Moore, S F 1978 Law as Process; Malinowski, B 1916 Crime and Custom in Savage Society; Bohannan, P 1957 Justice and Judgement among the Tiv; Comaroff J & S Roberts, 1981 Rules and Processes. Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

A three-hour examination in the ST worth 80%. Students must give two oral presentations (one each term), the best of these two presentations will count for 5% of the overall mark for the course. Students who do not give two presentations will receive a mark of 0 (incomplete).  In addition, students submit two written pieces based on their presentations of no more than 1000 words each: one in MT (7.5%) and one in LT (7.5%).