Lebenslauf | Publikationen | Projekt

Forschungsinteressen
Racism studies, border studies, anthropology of law, anthropology of the state, citizenship studies, feminist theory, reflexive anthropology

Forschungsgebiet(e)
Germany, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey

Profil

Harika Dauth is a doctoral candidate in the Law & Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale). She studied social anthropology, religious studies, and journalism in Leipzig and Istanbul.

Before and during her doctoral studies, she worked in political education. Her work included researching, documenting, and teaching on issues related to historical and contemporary forms of discrimination and oral history. In the framework of international training programmes for judges and judicial personnel, she developed awareness-raising modules on discrimination in the judiciary and everyday court proceedings.

Her current research focuses on institutional exclusion, citizenship, and the impact of legal and administrative practices. She is particularly interested in how authorities, courts, and political structures reproduce social inequalities, the historical contexts in which these practices are embedded, and the consequences for the lives of those affected.

Why Law and Anthropology?

Law is often presumed to be a neutral set of rules that applies equally to everyone. In practice, however, it becomes clear that legal norms are embedded in social, political, and historical power relations. It is precisely at this intersection that the connection between legal studies and anthropology comes into play.

An anthropological perspective on law makes it possible to analyse the societal effects of law: How do authorities act? How are laws interpreted? And how do people experience legal proceedings in everyday life? The process of addressing these questions reveals that formal equality does not automatically lead to equal treatment. Rather, administrative routines, institutional knowledge, and stereotypical attributions can contribute to institutional discrimination, with the effect that certain groups are systematically disadvantaged.

Law has a social impact that extends beyond individual cases. Judicial decisions, administrative acts, and legal regulations can shape patterns of interpretation regarding who is considered a member of society, which ways of life are recognized as legitimate, and which are not. In this way, law not only contributes to the ordering of social relations, but can also reproduce existing inequalities or create new ones.

I am particularly interested in how legal belonging is established, challenged, or restricted – not only by laws themselves, but also through their implementation by government agencies, street-level bureaucrats, and courts. These processes give rise to gradations of rights, access, and protection that are often not explicitly stated but can nevertheless affect holders of rights in existential ways.

These dynamics come to light at the intersection of law and anthropology, allowing us to analyse law not only as a norm but as a social practice. This reveals how power relations are reproduced in everyday administrative decisions, legal proceedings, and political discourses – and the consequences this has for the people affected.