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Forschungsinteressen
Asylrecht, kritische Rechtslehre
Forschungsgebiete
Vereinigtes Königreich, Südafrika
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Why Law & Anthropology?
In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry’s geographer never leaves his desk. Sure, he can point to the border of every kingdom, but ask him whether a given ocean is beautiful, or whether a river still runs, and he has nothing to say. After all, that's the explorer's job, not his. I am hesitant to push the analogy too far, but law is written and studied the same way too often: from the confines of the desk. For me, anthropology plays something of the explorer's role for law. It goes into the field, into courtrooms and, if you’re really brave, into the world of unfamiliar customary and religious orders that rarely make it into formal law.
I have also come to appreciate that the intellectual cross-pressures generated by an interdisciplinary outlook can liberate a person’s thinking from the limiting assumptions of their own disciplines, and stimulate fresh perspectives. In this instance, anthropology is the outsider for law and makes visible things that legal training has, in many respects, taught us to stop questioning. The value of that outsider's perspective is certainly important. On the one hand, it introduces new methods or bodies of knowledge. On the other, it creates a form of intellectual distance, or, dare I say, breathing space, from the categories through which a discipline ordinarily understands its object and purpose. It allows us to see that concepts which appear natural or universal from a legal perspective may look rather different when viewed through other socio-cultural and normative orders.
That visibility isn't a threat to law. It's actually where, notwithstanding differences in interpretation, law's best new ideas come from. Legal pluralism, the recognition of indigenous and customary legal orders, the cross-cultural struggles of human rights law, restorative justice, to name a few, didn’t grow out of doctrine reasoning with itself. It grew out of the productive friction that occurs at the intersection of different disciplines and ways of understanding the world. Studying law and anthropology together is thus my attempt to refuse the geographer’s chair.