The Governance of Legal Pluralism : Empirical Studies from Africa and Beyond

Law is considered by lawyers and sociologists to be at the very center of social integration in Western societies, whereas social anthropological discourses regard law as marginal in Non-Western societies. Empirical studies of multisited legal frameworks in many postcolonial political settings demonstrate the difficulties to achieve any predictable mode of governance, much less "good governance". The volume challenges both the marginalization of legal arrangements and discourses in social anthropology as well as the marginalization of legal anthropology within social anthropology. "The Governance of Legal Pluralism" aims at combining the related fields of Political and Legal Anthropology in order to contribute towards a meaningful (re)integration of the anthropology of law into the mainstream of social anthropology.