African Customary Justice

ISBN-13: 9781032149462 / Miękka / 2023 / 282 str.

Richard Werbner

Opis

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa.

Recenzje

"This book makes an important and highly valuable contribution to a renewed interest and multifaceted debate on justice-seeking in the legally plural contexts of African postcolonies and beyond. It does so through a complex and very nuanced study of legal proceedings in Botswana that have played out in different customary and state courts as well as religious fora over the past 50 years. Written by renowned and long-established experts in the field with an exceptional depth of personal experience of the local dynamics and complexities, the book makes an important theoretical case for combining jurisprudential debates on public ethics with a study of living laws within the normative pluralities characterising not only the postcolony, but increasingly also the world at large."

Olaf Zenker, Chair of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin　Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Spis treści

 

1. Introduction: Living Law, Public Ethics and Legal Pluralism

PART ONE: PUBLIC ETHICS AND LEGAL PLURALISM

2. Looking Back: Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law in a Tswapong Village
3. Tlholego: Nature, Culture and Destiny
4. The Oracular Court of Sedimo vs. the Customary Court
5. An Unburied Past: Chiefly Succession and the Politics of Memory
6. What’s in a Name? The Struggle for Identity in Statutory Courts

PART TWO: LEGAL SUBJECTIVITIES, ETHICS AND PLURALISM

7. Divorce as Process, Botswana Style: Customary Courts and Gender Activism
8. Adultery as Process, Botswana Style: Gender and Changing Customary Law

9. Inheritance as Turmoil: From Citizens’ Forum to Magisterial Justice

10. A Case of Insult: Emotions, Law and Witchcraft Accusations

11. A Moral Economy of Crime and the Proportionality of Punishment

12. Conclusion: Customary Law as Living Law, Legal Pluralism and Public Ethics

O autorze

Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, UK. She has published extensively on Law and Anthropology.

Richard Werbner is Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology, Honorary Research Professor in Visual Anthropology, the University of Manchester, sometime Senior Post- Doctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution, Senior Fellow (National Humanities Center), Overseas Professor (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka). He has recently given the Elliot P. Skinner Memorial Lecture for the Association for Africanist Anthropology, the Royal African Society Lecture, and the Jackman Lectures.