1.

A close look at the socio-cultural contexts of jural

expressions enhances our understanding of them.
Both laws and politics have a genetic dimension, with rolls
simultaneously repressive and creative that become more understandable if
one faces them as socio-cultural forms with dynamic characteristics and
specially if taken in context together in their greater social environments
where they take part and are a part.
A jural system becomes more understandable the more we re-insert it in
its political, religious, economic, cultural and social contexts.
Jural systems are simultaneously systems of social action and systems of
significance. A jural system always provides a body of ways to harmonize
particular social interests and abstract cultural meanings. This makes
possible to unveil some internal logic of practices and particular social
theories
A social manifestation which nature we recognize as juridical is always
more understandable if faced, simultaneously, as a way of cultural
expression, as given body to forms of power and domination and if seen as
an entity dedicated to express rational mechanisms towards conflict
resolution problems.
law, rather than a mere technical add-on to a morality (or immorally)
finished society, is, along of course with a whole range of other cultural
realities from the symbolics of faith to the means of production, an active
part of it. CLIFFORD GEERTZ
More than just mere reflexes, the jural creates at the internal part of
communities, vivid images of values, social categories, motivations, wills,
duties, behaviors, that follow the social actors actions and influence them
actively in the process.
With the jural comes a variety of the same type of that we recognize in
beliefs, religious practices and rituals.
For any anthropologist, complexity is always taken as a structural
property of situations occurred in social life as it introduces changes which
the observer has no control on.
Each case is a case and as much richer and multidimensional their
description is, more elucidative the explanations about are.
Sistema de significados.

Paul Bohannan and the TIV case method + conclusion + cultural

influence: only so have I been able to see law not as something universal
but as the tremendous cultural achievement that it is
Importncia da observao participante
Falar da cultura dos Tiv e dos sonhos dos Atta (AMG: sustento que as
interpretaes colectivas dos sonhos dos indivduos adultos evocam e
articulam, por um lado, o que so, no fundo, expresses simblicas centrais
a algumas imagens sustidas como modelaes ideais do comportamento
social. Neste sentido tratar-se ia assim de uma espcie de idioma, como que
duma linguagem dos Atta relativa aos sonhos. Uma esquematizao
conceptual que, de uma maneira abstracta e idealizada, daria corpo a uma
sistemtica desvalorizao de valores sociais e morais negativos e, bem
assim, a uma valorizao correlativa de valores ideias positivos. Um
mecanismo tico, normativo, de algum modo
In the context of a practice endemic within a cultural rea
(headhunting in Southeast Asia), this session breaks up various convergent
analytical strands w that enhance its intelligibility. The role of interpretation
and the structure of anthropological explanations. The social place of the
legal and the political. The observer, the observer, and observation.
Malinowski explained how brainless societies were able to maintain
order without courts and constables specifying in his opinion that law
ought to be defined by function and not by form, that is we ought to see
what are the arrangements, the sociological realities, the cultural
mechanism which underlay its application. The study of the various forces
which make for order, uniformity and cohesion in a savage tribe such as
reciprocal obligations built-in to kinship systems, fear of witchcraft or
other forms of social and outcast pressure.
Sally Falk-Moore + Simon Roberts + John Comaroff: more than just
law or norm the investigators focus was in the maintenance of social
order, and more than systematic mechanisms by its own, the formulations
produced were added by a recognition intensified of the creative roll and
even discretionary, of social actors, individuals or collective ones.
Formal definitions were thus substituted by a renovated concerned
with local notions and concepts, behavior regularities and institutional
interactions.
Lawrence Rosen (analysis of the quadi courts in a small town in
Morocco): the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems,
requires at its base an understanding of the categories of meaning by which
participants themselves comprehend their experience and orient
themselves toward one another in their everyday lives. He demonstrated
that despite its so-called power, a contemporary quadi judge assumes

positions and makes regular decisions, predictable and highly standardized,

which regularity lies in the fit between the decisions of the Muslim judge
and the cultural concepts and social relations to which they are inextricably
tied.

2. The few studies published by jurists are so

embedded in the so-called lawyers models used
to analyze conflict resolution mechanisms that
they become useless.
Bohannan vs Gluckman conflito das metodologias
Bohannan starting point: Tiv notions that work up to generalization
Gluckman starting point: already translate Barotse notions to western
battery of concepts
Foundational tension between those who privilege the study of law as
it self and legal forms associated, and those who look at those data focusing
on its essential as mechanism part of general institutions of social control
and order maintenance.
Until Max Gluckman book, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of
Northern Rhodesia, the jural studies about traditional African societies
consisted in little more tham extensive compendiums of rules and
principles taken by, sometimes indirect, data collection of missionaries,
colonial employees or occasional travelers.
During the 1950s and 1960s, legal anthropologists were largely
concerned with law as an aspect of social control through the imposition of
sanctions, and saw legal procedures as the means of enforcing social rules.
Following Malinowski, legal anthropologists generally viewed mechanisms of
dispute resolution as rational.
A crucial debate emerged during this time about the relationship
between legal and anthropological methods, and particularly over the
question of whether legal anthropologists should apply Anglo-American legal
categories to the study of non-Western societies. This debate centered
primarily on two leading figures in legal anthropology during this period;
Max Gluckman and Paul Bohannan, though by no means was it limited
to these two. Indeed, during this same period the number of scholars who
identified themselves as legal anthropologists grew considerably. Bohannan
believed that using universal legal categories serves as a barrier to
understanding and representing another culture and advocated the liberal
use of native legal terms. While these terms could not be easily translated

into English, their meanings could be explained within an ethnographic

context.
Gluckman considered Bohannans approach to be both overcautious
and a barrier to fruitful comparative analysis. It is apparent that their debate
was not so much about the nature of law itself, but rather the nature of legal
anthropology, raising issues about representation, language, and cultural
comparison.
Even though Gluckman used lots of lozi language terms, the
terminology used in the ethnographic systematization of it was the one of
Legal Theories common at the universities where he worked.
Simon Roberts: useless of spending energy in an effort to isolate
legal data for separate examination, which is characteristic of law-centered
studies. Given the nature of social control institutions in small-scale
societies, such works must necessarily involve ultimately unsatisfactory
efforts to extract differentiated legal materials from an undifferentiated
mass of data found in the society concerned.