KDEC 9255 - Anthropology of Law - The Work of Categories

Do legal categories mimic the world or do they change it? What happens when a corporation is being treated like a person? A product of the human imagination and legal tinkering, a corporation is clearly not a human being and yet it shares many of the same affordances and burdens. What is the pragmatic role of legal categories in creating our social reality? Our mission in this class is to use anthropological research to deal with one of the big questions of legal epistemology—is law a world unto itself. We will see how categories can be built in different ways and how legal professionals and the legal apparatus make sense of the world through categories. Centrally, we will learn how to turn an abstract question like the use of categories in legal reasoning into a pragmatic research question that is amenable to ethnographic observation. Introducing law students to anthropology, we will learn what ethnographic observation is and how we can use it to better understand the working of law. The class is divided into three sections that logically build on one another. We will first look at theoretical writing on the epistemology of law and how legal categories differ from other disciplinary and practice-based analytic languages. In the second section, we let ethnographies show us how legal categories operate in practice and how empirical observation offers an alternative way to make sense of the working of law. The third section is dedicated to ethnographic and historical case studies of how legal categories stem from the extrajudicial world and recursively react on it. We will look at areas as diverse as land, finance, indigeneity, sovereignty, crops, trade, property and contracts. We will also conduct one fieldtrip to a legal bureaucracy to see how ordinary legal agents work with categories on a daily basis.

Gustav KALM

Séminaire

English

Spring 2023-2024

The grade will be composed of three components: 1) You will have to write short responses (maximum 300 words) to the weekly readings that will form the basis of our discussion in class. These will be uploaded to [NAME OF THE PLATFORM] by 6pm the day before class so we can have a look at the answers of others before the class. They should summarize the main argument of the reading, point to some internal shortcomings of the text and finish with a question for the class to consider. 2) You will write a short ethnographic analysis of the collective fieldtrip. This is a rehearsal for writing an ethnography of your own choice later in the semester. This should not be longer than three pages and should draw inspiration from the ethnographies read in class so far. 3) After the first two sections of the class, students will need to submit an initial proposal for an ethnography (up to two pages)—what would you observe and what theoretical question would your observations help answer. We will discuss these collectively in the following week, giving each other feedback. The final ethnography (up to seven pages) is to be submitted at the last week of class. The ethnographic paper should seek to answer a theoretical question on the work of categories broadly understood by using participant observation and other tools of ethnographic fieldwork to answer the question. There is no exam. Assessments & Required / Suggested Readings The final grade will be based on the following three assignment categories: • 20% Weekly reading responses • 30% Short ethnography from the field trip • 50% Ethnographic paper

Session Themes Session 1 Why Anthropology of Law? Background read: “Introduction” in Goodale, Mark. Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction. New York: NYU Press, 2017. Part I – Law and Categories of Reasoning Session 2 The Pragmatics of Categories of Thought and Analysis “Rules and Categories: an Overview” in Dresch, Paul, and Judith Scheele, eds. Legalism: Rules and Categories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Mitchell, Timothy. “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World.” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie 46, no. 2 (2005): 297–320. Session 3 Law as a parallel world “Artifices of Truth in the Medieval ius commune” in Thomas, Yan. Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense. Translated by Chantal Schütz and Anton Schütz. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Riles, Annelise. “Collateral Expertise: Legal Knowledge in the Global Financial Markets.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 795–818. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (Edward Evan). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1937. Short selection. Session 4 How the parallel world structures our lives Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allan Lane, 1975. Short selection. Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Selection. Part II – Ethnography of Legal Reasoning Session 5 What is Ethnography? “Thick Description” in Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Latour, Bruno. The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat. Translated by Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Chapter 2. Session 6 Ordinary Legal Work Kennedy, David. “Spring Break.” Texas Law Review 63, no. 8 (1985): 1377–1423. Ballestero, Andrea. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Selection. Session 7 Pragmatic sanction of material: The Agency of the File Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Selection. Hull, Matthew S. “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy.” Language & Communication 23, no. 3–4 (July 2003): 287–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00019-3. Session 8 Fieldtrip Collective visit to a legal bureaucratic office [law firm, immigration advocacy, tax authority tbd] DUE: Ethnographic research proposal Part III – The Pragmatics of Legal Categories in Action Session 9 Material or Asset Hetherington, Kregg. The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Selection. + in-class discussion of research proposals, helping each other with the ethnographic research projects DUE: Short ethnography from the fieldtrip Session 11 Contract as a Market Device Muehlebach, Andrea. “Contract as Frontier Device, or, the Political Publics of Water Infrastructures.” Journal of Cultural Economy 16, no. 3 (May 4, 2023): 363–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2176342. “Contract” in Appel, Hannah. The Licit Life of Capitalism: U.S. Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Session 12 Land and Indigeneity Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Selection. Chanock, Martin. “A Peculiar Sharpness: An Essay on Property in the History of Customary Law in Colonial Africa.” The Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1991): 65–88. DUE: Final ethnography