Refine
Document Type
- Article (3)
- Part of a Book (2)
Keywords
- Arrival and departure (1)
- Autorität (1)
- Custom (1)
- Customary law (1)
- Digital age (1)
- Disputing (1)
- Erinnerung (1)
- Ethiopia (1)
- Ethnologie (1)
- Familie (1)
Institute
The State of Custom
(2021)
In our article, we engage with the anthropologist Gerd Spittler’s pathbreaking
article “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) in which
he strives to integrate the existence of state courts (the eponymous Leviathan’s
shadow) in (post-)colonial Africa into the analysis on non-state court legal practices.
According to Spittler, it is because of undesirable characteristics inherent
in state courts that the disputing parties tended to rather involve mediators than
pursue a state court judgment. The less people liked state courts, the more likely
they were to (re-)turn to dispute settlement procedures. Now how has this situation
changed in the last four decades since its publication date? We relate his findings
to contemporary debates in legal anthropology that investigate the relationship
between disputing, law and the state. We also show through our own work in
Africa and Asia, particularly in Southern Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan, in what ways
Spittler’s by now classical contribution to the field of legal anthropology in 1980
can be made fruitful for a contemporary anthropology of the state at a time when
not only (legal) anthropology has changed, but especially the way states deal with
putatively “customary” forms of dispute settlement.
Shared Field, Divided Field
(2020)
Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention has been paid to the analogous moment of departure from the field. The digital age enables both sides to maintain contact, a shift that negates the finality of earlier departures. This article engages the changes wrought by digital media that allow us to remain connected to the field. While this seems a humane affordance, it also means that it is no longer feasible to cleanly sever ties established ‘there’. When anthropologists leave the field, the field will likely follow them—on Facebook or Instagram.
Bittamo
(2021)
The Ethiopian state increasingly seeks to enlist putative ‘traditional authorities’ to lend legitimacy to policies and interventions in the southwestern peripheries of the country. The underlying assumptions do not accord with the perceptions of the local populations: among the Kara in the South Omo region, legitimacy is predicated upon duty and accountability, and higher degrees of public legitimacy are disconnected from authority and direct command over other people’s conduct. The office of the Kara bitti, the highest spiritual leader, thus proves intractable to such attempts at enlistment and has been little affected by the radical transformation of the Kara’s lives through increasing integration into the Ethiopian state over recent decades. But even as the office has changed little, the lives of those expected to assume the role of bitti has, and the duties of a bitti strongly constrain the office holder and limit their personal ambitions and participation in politics at the local, regional and national level.