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This paper explores social actors' arguments regarding daughters' inheritance, their use in court, and the implications of legal pluralism on governance in Pakistan. It scrutinizes the notion of custom, non-state law, and positive law as crucial dynamics that shed light on the ways social actors make sense of power and governance. In Foucauldian terms, this paper deals with the formation of statements -their temporalization and their becoming but in particular sheds light on the potential logics of the perpetuation of gender discrimination in inheritance laws. This paper suggests that the everyday arguments that play a role in the elaboration of the story told to the courts and received by the judge have the role of actants. Within the framework of proceedings it is possible to isolate the micro-units on which the legal discourse is elaborated either for state-or non-state jurisdiction, or for both of them, not necessarily seen as antagonistic places, and not necessarily seen within a framework of justice and injustice. This paper concludes that notwithstanding polarized discourses on centralized and decentralized governance, everyday practices of law in Pakistan tend rather to perpetuate non-state law together with positive law as continuous and concomitant interlegalities in and beyond the state instead of exclusive and conflicting sources of legitimacy.

The use of anthropology and sociology for dispute resolution, law-making, and governance has been frequent throughout the history of law and anthropology. Anthropological expertise in the form of expert witnessing or expert information, has been one among the significant activities of applied anthropology. However, no concept such the one of cultural expertise was formulated to theorise the engagement of anthropologists and sociologists with law. This paper adopts an historical approach in order to understand why socio-legal studies have not developed a conceptualisation that encompasses the variety of the types of engagement of social scientists, and anthropologists in particular. It investigates the connection between law and culture in the history of anthropology of law since social evolutionism, and focuses in particular on legal pluralism. This paper suggests that the reasons for the late conceptualisation of cultural expertise lies on the one hand in the difficulty to define the dynamics between law and culture, and on the other hand in the specific development of legal pluralism vis-à-vis the state. This paper concludes with a reformulation of the concept of cultural expertise as an umbrella concept that encompasses the existing array of socio-legal instruments that use cultural knowledge for conflict resolution.

This article features qualitative case law studies based on extensive fieldwork in rural Madhya Pradesh in India. It focuses on perceptions of law in the dispute-settlement process at the grassroots level, highlighting the features of legal consciousness especially in relation to forum-shopping strategies between traditional and official jurisdiction. It shows that at the local level customs are reinterpreted in the light of modern values. Yet they remain the main reference point in the struggle between official law and traditional law.

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