Macalester Moodle

What are the different types of political systems? How did the state evolve? What is the relationship between the structure of political systems and the processes of political action? Are societies lacking political authority vested in an individual or an institution necessarily anarchic? How do different types of political systems maintain social order and resolve disputes? What issues of law and justice arise in plural (multicultural) societies? These are some of the questions that confront the twinned sub-disciplines of political and legal anthropology that we will explore in this course.

While political anthropology is the study of how power is distributed and wielded in a society, the anthropology of law concerns itself with the way social order is maintained and how “law” — as distinct from custom — is formulated and applied. This course examines the meaning of law and politics in cross-cultural perspective. The first half of the course examines how anthropologists have approached the study of politics and the state, from the structural functionalism of the 1940s and 50s to more processual approaches that emphasize the role of agents. In the second half of the course, we examine how people in different places at different times have understood the concept of law, how their understanding has been concretely manifested in the formulation of rules governing social relations and how those rules have been enforced. Role playing in a mock court, where the class puts on trial a Comanche medicine woman for practicing medicine without a license, will be used to understand how law works in a culturally complex society.