Bringing into View

Abstract

A new colleague in a recent email communication about this journal posed the question of whether the term ‘legal’ was being put in opposition to ‘illegal’: was there an illegal anthropology? My response must be left in part to the views of other likely interlocutors as to what is or can be evoked when we seemingly endeavour to attach or subdivide anthropology in envisaged specialist areas. The acknowledged spaces to bring out understandings of the legal alongside and within anthropology, in general, through particular frames and representations turn our attention to a dialogical field of knowledge in relation to sociolegal phenomena. I further consider that legal anthropology is not simply, if it ever was, about a type of anthropology called legal, whether opposed to illegal or not, to give a nod to such asides. The wide scholarship eschews any isolated idea of legal in anthropology and incorporates analyses of everyday settings marked, for instance, by implicit and explicit systems of governance and how these are experienced. This also ranges from historical readings of customs and norms to accounts of contemporary rational-legal settings.