ANTHRO 1603 - Law and Its Limits

Prof. Malavika Reddy
W 3-5:45pm

We often talk about the power of law to shape our worlds but what about its powerlessness? An axiom of contemporary life is that societies need law to address social, political and environmental ills. Yet, in the face of entrenched problems, law often appears impotent or, worse, detrimental. This course grapples with the simultaneous hunger for and weakness of law, its power and its powerlessness, by guiding students through an exploration of the following questions. What is the relation between law and violence? How does legal process transform conflict and define the terms of its resolution? Can law restrain arbitrary power? How, why and to whose benefit or expense is the legal posed as an answer to political and social problems? The course will seek answers to these questions via an engagement with the ethnographic – close readings of a variety of judicial processes -- and the theoretical. In so doing, the course will be guided by two objectives: 1. to compile a toolkit of methods and concepts with which social scientists have studied law and 2. to trouble commonsense pieties about law and its place in social life.