Inventing Law in Local Settings: Rethinking Popular Legal Culture

TLDR

Popular legal culture distinguishes an official legal system from everyday legal practices, a dichotomy that is especially pronounced in colonial contexts and highlights the coexistence of formal statutes and informal, self‑help arrangements. The study investigates how the official and popular legal orders interact, transform, and constitute each other, questioning whether the popular is merely a variation of the official or a distinct, plural legal order.

Abstract

T]erms like popular culture or popular art . . .assume the existence of two kinds of culture, high and popular, which are so different that they cannot be compared, thus positing an initial dichotomy which then shapes all subsequent analysis. I. INTRODUCTIONLike the notion of "popular culture," popular legal culture implies the existence of an official culture of law distinct from everyday legal practices and understandings.Ethnographic studies of law, in the United States and cross-culturally, underscore the significance of this distinction, which becomes most apparent in colonial contexts where a new state system is imposed on traditional legal forms. 2 Yet equally striking differences have been noted in the industrialized West between an official rule of law codified in formal statutes, dominated by a professional elite and symbolized in a national system of courts, on the one hand, and unofficial systems in which informal agreement, various forms of self-help, gossip, avoidance, and "lumping it" are customary practice, on the other.'While these distinctions are familiar, it is less clear how to explain the connection of the "official" to the "popular," the extent to which we are describing what is clearly a "plural" legal order or variations on a "parent social speech,"" and the degree to which the "popular" is subtly constituted, and ultimately, transformed by the "official" (or vice versa), even in situations where there is no evident imposition of a particular order of t Professor of Anthropology, Hampshire College. 2 Yet equally striking differences have been noted in the industrialized West between an official rule of law codified in formal statutes, dominated by a professional elite and symbolized in a national system of courts, on the one hand, and unofficial systems in which informal agreement, various forms of self-help, gossip, avoidance, and "lumping it" are customary practice, on the other.'While these distinctions are familiar, it is less clear how to explain the connection of the "official" to the "popular," the extent to which we are describing what is clearly a "plural" legal order or variations on a "parent social speech,"" and the degree to which the "popular" is subtly constituted, and ultimately, transformed by the "official" (or vice versa), even in situations where there is no evident imposition of a particular order of t Professor of Anthropology, Hampshire College.