Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social
Making Persons and Things

Focuses on how law produces persons and things, and develops new approaches to the question of ownership.

Alain Pottage (Edited by), Martha Mundy (Edited by)

9780521831789, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 June 2004

324 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.635 kg

This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.

Notes on contributors
1. Introduction: the fabrication of persons and things Alain Pottage
2. Res Religiosae: on the categories of religion and commerce in Roman law Yan Thomas
3. Scientific objects and legal objectivity Bruno Latour
4. Legal fabrications and the case of 'cultural property' Tim Murphy
5. Ownership or office? A debate in Islamic Hanafite jurisprudence over the nature of the military 'fief', from the Mamluks to the Ottomans Martha Mundy
6. Gedik: a bundle of rights and obligations for Istanbul artisans and traders, 1750–1840 Engin Deniz Akarli
7. Losing (out on) intellectual resources Marilyn Strathern
8. Re-visualising attachment: an anthropological perspective on persons and property forms Susanne Küchler
9. Our original inheritance Alain Pottage
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Social law [LNT], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Anthropology [JHM]