The Anthropology of Legal Form: Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Transnational Law

Abstract

For most of legal anthropology’s existence as a distinct subfield, ethnographers have studied the function of law rather than its form. With the proliferation of neoliberal technologies of governance, however, anthropologists are increasingly turning to law’s form. This article surveys the anthropology of legal form and its contribution to the study of transnational law and governance. In taking legal form as the object of ethnographic inquiry, legal anthropologists examine the material, sensory, and symbolic dimensions through which law is recognized. Such an approach analyzes how power operates not through law’s substantive meanings but, rather, through its aesthetic dimensions. Current anthropological scholarship has illuminated the diverse ways in which the technical and formal aesthetics of law operate to foreclose political contestation. I argue, however, that the aesthetics of legal form may also be mobilized to render power relations visible and open to challenge amidst proliferating forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within one arena of global governance—the UN Committee on World Food Security—I illustrate how activists draw on the aesthetics of rights to illuminate inequalities and politicize governance processes. In doing so, I suggest that greater engagement with Jacques Rancière’s political theory of aesthetics can deepen anthropological insights into the power of legal form in the context of transnational law and governance.