Inside and Outside The Law
Subtitle: Anthropological Studies of Authority and Ambiguity (European Association of Social Anthropologists)
Publisher: Routledge
Published: December 6, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780415129299
First sentence: The theme of this book derives from a course I taught on 'The Politics of Tradition', which looked at the concept of custom: the ongoing tension between a concept of society grounded in rules, and one that focuses rather on social action, strategy and improvisation.
Description: Law is a discourse of absolutes, and yet it is beset by ambiguities. Legality is inevitably identified with morality, and yet there is in all legal systems a zone where the legal and the non-legal become hard to distinguish, and where it is debatable how far the moral and social standing of particular groups or individuals can be equated with their legal status. Anthropology is typically concerned with the frontiers of legality, and with groups defined by the law as marginal.

Inside and Outside the Law reflects on the ambiguities of law's authority, drawing on comparative case-studies of ethnic groups within different modern states, of groups defined as marginal through their sexual behaviour, and on analyses of the ambiguities at the heart of state authority itself. Inside and Outside the Law will be of interest to political scientists and legal theorists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists concerned with popular conceptions of the state and its laws.