Law and Religion: Reimagining the Entanglement of Two Universals

Abstract

In the last few decades, the study of law and religion has undergone considerable reconstruction. Less and less constrained by modern statist construals of rights talk or tied to confessional contexts, the comparative study of the intersection of law and religion by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars is undergoing a real renaissance. Exciting new work explores the entanglement of legal and religious ideas, institutions, and material objects across the entire space and time of human history. This article models an engagement between the academic study of religion and sociolegal scholarship by introducing scholars in both fields to contemporary debates in the study of law and religion. These debates examine how and when state law persists as a meaningful arena of contestation; the role of indigenous elites and arrangements of legal pluralism in colonial contexts; and new approaches to economy, race, and sovereignty and citizenship. By mobilizing an understanding of law that does not take for granted the state's alleged monopoly on generating and regulating legal normativity, the article argues that holding law and religion in abeyance as normative traditions invites a far more expansive imaging of these universals in their singularity, in their copresence, and as overlapping domains.