The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law

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Legal pluralism, social theory, and the state

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann & Bertram Turner

To cite this article: Keebet von Benda-Beckmann & Bertram Turner (2018) Legal pluralism,
social theory, and the state, The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 50:3, 255-274,
DOI: 10.1080/07329113.2018.1532674

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THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW
2018, VOL. 50, NO. 3, 255–274
https://doi.org/10.1080/07329113.2018.1532674

Legal pluralism, social theory, and the state

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Bertram Turner
Department ‘Law & Anthropology’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Legal pluralism has seen a marked rise in interest since the turn Received 4 July 2018
of the century. While long rejected in legal studies, legal pluralism Accepted 3 October 2018
is now widely accepted, not least in light of the broad range of
KEYWORDS
perspectives on the state it has sought to interpret and it has
Legal pluralism; social
produced. A crucial change could be noted in the 1970s, when theory; globalization; state;
legal anthropologists began to demonstrate the applicability of anthropology of law
this term, and not just in anthropological thinking about law.
Political and economic developments also profoundly changed
constellations of legal pluralism, following diverse trajectories in
which the concept obtained multiple meanings. While highlight-
ing significant stages of this process, this chapter discusses how
anthropological insights in law and legal pluralism metamor-
phosed from the study of law in colonial societies towards law of
a widely varying scope under conditions of ever-increasing global
connectedness. The epistemological insights drawn from the
diverse trajectories reflect and shape the social theories of the
time, where intersections of state and law represent a central
theme, albeit to a greater extent in some periods, and virtually
absent in others.

1. Introduction
Long rejected in legal studies, the term legal pluralism has seen a remarkable rise of
interest since the turn of the century. Now legal pluralist approaches both reflect and
produce new perspectives on the role of the state in plural legal orders. This article
focuses on the role of state law and discusses significant stages in the development of
research on legal pluralism. The study of law and legal pluralism occurred in dialog
with various strands of social theories, ranging from highly abstract theories, such as
evolutionist theories, to general theories of social phenomena, such as structuralism,
functionalism, and actor-oriented approaches, such as structuration, social construct-
ivism, and actor network theory. More recently, this list has also come to include
social theories concerned with specific political and economic development, such as
globalization theories. Such theoretical tools proved essential for analytical frame-
works to be able to address the anthropological dimensions and in the context of glo-
bal modernity to direct the analytical gaze to everyday instances where law, the state,

CONTACT Keebet von Benda-Beckmann [email protected]

ß 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
256 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

and the social interact. We highlight some intermediary stages in the development of
general social theory that display simultaneous, interacting and co-constituting trajec-
tories and the emergence of various approaches to studying the role of the state and
its law in plural legal configurations.1 We argue that the analysis of these simultane-
ities sheds light on modifications that have had an impact on how the state is viewed
in legal pluralism.
We proceed from the understanding that there is no impermeable disciplinary
demarcation between anthropology and other social sciences, nor do we see the
anthropology of law as a closed sub-discipline (F. von Benda-Beckmann 2005). While
the focus of this chapter is on anthropological understandings, where appropriate, we
include disciplines that are intimately linked with anthropology. However, what dis-
tinguishes anthropological work from other social science studies is its inherent focus
on everyday practices in (multi-)local situations and the aim to capture the terms by
which people understand their social life.

2. Legal complexity in early history

Although a fairly recent concept in the social sciences, the phenomenon of legal plur-
alism has persisted throughout history. It has provided the very “condition of possi-
bility” for pre-modern empires and thus has been part of a normative logic of
statehood. Such a model of statehood also referenced the diversity of its constitutive
people in terms of normativity. All early empires recognized this and dealt with it in
pragmatic ways. In a post-Westphalian world order, two entangled strands of polit-
ico-legal development gained momentum, the nation state and its political counter-
part, the imperial and colonial state. This development entailed the axiomatic shift
from “where there is society, there is law” to “where there is state, there is law.” Only
with the establishment of nation states and ideologies that canonized the state-peo-
ple-law nexus in the nineteenth century, the prevalence of legal pluralism came to be
seen as problematic. This coincided with theories of modernity and evolutionist con-
ceptions of social organization, development and linear progress, and that included
imperialism and colonialism. While emerging nation states sought to eliminate all
traces of legal pluralism in domestic legal ideology, though it continued to exist
unabated in practice, in colonial states, the realities of legal pluralism needed to be
acknowledged, not least as an administrative necessity.
In this context, colonial empires began to distinguish “modern” law from customs,
tradition, and “primitive” law. In line with evolutionist thinking, scholars began to sys-
tematically collect and compare “precursors” of modern law. But this issue was not
merely of theoretical interest. It was also of high political relevance, because according
to legal doctrine, customs and tradition – in contrast to customary or traditional law –
could be disregarded at the whim of the administration. Colonial experiences incited
lawyers and administrators to consider whether existing normative orders in the colo-
nies could be characterized as law or as mere custom. Scholars of different provenience
also developed an interest in local laws. There was greater “disciplinary job sharing”
among scholars of different disciplines than today (Turner 2017, 291–295). Most schol-
ars adopted evolutionary theories aimed at a universal theory of law.2 These theories
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 257

presumed that early models of order had been based on feuds and retaliation, genea-
logical relationships, and on communal ownership. These evolved into hierarchical soci-
eties with property regimes based on individual ownership. But it was only with the
emergence of states that law assumed its full role of maintaining order.
Circumstances such as these provided the setting in which anthropology emerged
as a discipline, whereby “anthropology of law,” as one of its constitutive sections,
developed in dialogue with legal history and legal philosophy. Towards the end of the
nineteenth century, a comparative interest in uncodified or “primitive” law emerged
as precursors of modern law, as orally transmitted remnants of the earliest forms of
law. The study of these laws made early forms methodologically accessible. Following
the standard anthropological methods of the time, questionnaires were designed for
various colonial territories, based on which colonial administrators, missionaries,
judges, and travelers were expected to generate descriptions of the local and regional
laws. The standard format would enable systematic comparison of different manifes-
tations of “primitive law.” However, the fact that the questionnaire was based on
European legal systems led to serious misrepresentations. Thus within the ambit of
disciplines concerned with a universal legal history of humankind, the aim of legal
anthropology was twofold: On the one hand, to research phaseologically pre-, or early
law in presentist environments and, on the other, to address the challenges of “legal
pluralism” as an applied colonial practice. The mass of collected data showed that the
transition from “primitive” to modern law was not unilineal. Complex legal configu-
rations in which incommensurable legal systems overlapped in time and space were
the rule endured within and across state boundaries.

3. From colonialism to the postcolony

At the turn to the twentieth century, new fields and methods of inquiry emerged
with growing interest in what constituted law in daily social and economic interac-
tions. A holistic approach was supposed to guarantee the study of all aspects of social
life. Anthropological fieldwork entailed full immersion in a society to allow the
researcher to see how law was used in daily practices. Societies with relatively loose
forms of institutionalization and flat hierarchies were studied without interrogating
the effects of colonial rule. Such research nevertheless helped understand how law
could function in societies without specialized institutions for legislation and law
enforcement, and to what extent social organization relied on reciprocity and on
community as a public forum. That line of research embraced functionalist perspec-
tives, and paid special attention to the social function of law and customs.
Parallel to this development, as legal scholars began to engage in empirical
research, emergent disciplinary boundaries between social and legal sciences were
blurred. In the Netherlands, Van Vollenhoven (1909) argued that a deep understand-
ing of customary law was essential for the Dutch colonial government.
Misunderstanding its character led to illegal expropriation of land and other resour-
ces. His interest in the diversity of laws, their similarities and differences across the
Malay Archipelago, was genuinely academic, notwithstanding his political motivation.
The relations between local and colonial laws and the manner in which colonial
258 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

courts determined how local laws were interpreted were key to his analyses (F. von
Benda-Beckmann 2002, Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 2011).
Colonial administrative activity itself contributed to the complexity and diversity
of plural legal configurations. Parts of local legal registers interacted with the legal
order of the colonial state as they were acknowledged and codified by the colonial
state. In this way, they became entangled with the dynamics within traditional and
religious normativity. The result was that the borders between state and other-than-
state law were sometimes barely recognizable. Similar diversity would later be redis-
covered both in the post-colonial and the industrialized colonizing states.
The pioneers of this era, among them, anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and
Richard Thurnwald, as well as Eugen Ehrlich, a legal scholar, built the foundation for
the modern anthropological work on law through various trajectories. Primarily inter-
ested in law as an organizing principle of society that ensured social cohesion, they paid
relatively little attention to conflicts and disputes. Pioneering the study of local laws in
relation to the state and its law, however, Van Vollenhoven argued that adat (custom-
ary) law inevitably undergoes change when colonial courts and administrative institu-
tions use it, which Anglo-American legal anthropology did not take into account until
the 1970s. His analytical concepts underscored his criticism towards the colonial govern-
ment, which systematically, and often intentionally, misrepresented the character of adat
regimes and thereby violated its promise to fully recognize adat law. Careful academic
analysis thus had profound political implications, for it showed that the government’s
expropriation of large tracts of land for economic development was largely illegal.
That brought forth the insight that more knowledge of “unadulterated customary
law” was needed, a trajectory that allowed legal anthropologists to step out of the
shadow of the colonial state. Thus, the focus on law as organized in registers that
inevitably share basic features and allow for a comparative analysis did not go unchal-
lenged. Pioneers in the African colonial context, such as Max Gluckman and his
Manchester School, put customary law center stage, advancing the notion that cus-
tomary law was best understood through the study of disputes by means of the
extended case method. However, the disadvantage of this very method was that they
lost sight of the state. In fact, many authors interested in customary laws in this
period show a remarkable lack of interest in the state.
Eventually, a paradigm shift could be noted in the last phases of colonialism,
roughly between the 1940s and the 1970s, when legal anthropologists took to concep-
tualizing customary law devoid of the state. The interest shifted towards the
“pathological aspects of law,” that is, disputes and processes of dispute resolution
(Twining 2012, 123). This coincided with new theoretical views that underlined the
importance of conflict for maintaining society (Nader 1965, 21). In the US, Llewellyn
and Hoebel (lawyer and anthropologist respectively) jointly published a famous study
of Cheyenne law in 1941 based on an analysis of case material. It was inspired by
legal realists, who argued that regulations obtained their true meaning through inter-
pretation in real situations, so that only court decisions could shed light on the pre-
cise content of a law (Darian-Smith 2013a, 62). Nevertheless, this line of research
eventually brought legal pluralism back on the agenda as it paved the way from dis-
putes as a source of law to law in practice.
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 259

Two research strands could be distinguished in the use of the case method to
study disputes, each with a different theoretical objective (Roberts 1979a).
Anthropologists like Leopold Posp
ısil (1971) used disputes as a source from which
unwritten law could be distilled. Others took a more process-oriented approach,
studying disputes to understand processes of disputing behavior and decision-making
(Comaroff and Roberts 1981).
The interest pursued by the German and Dutch legal anthropologists was broader
in scope. They argued that the significance of law derived from its use in the social,
economic, and political life in general, and only secondarily from disputes, calling for
the study of “trouble cases” and “trouble-less cases” (Holleman 1981; F. von Benda
Beckmann 1985). In these studies, the state represented a part of the complex legal
situation in which people operated. While for some anthropologists the guiding the-
oretical questions addressed how law was used in decision-making, others also
studied how law affected practices of negotiation. The shift in focus from code to
cases, and subsequently to contexts and settings, eventually brought the state back on
the agenda and with it also legal pluralism. Dispute studies were thus instrumental in
the ‘discovery’ of plural legal configurations within the modern nation state.

4. Social and legal complexity

4.1. Consolidating research on disputing processes
In the 1970s, insights in disputing processes were further refined with field research
in so-called developing countries and industrial societies.3 At the height of the inde-
pendence movements against the colonial regimes, when postcolonial and emerging
states and their institutions became the subject of critical reflection, the nation state
became the standard organizing principle of the political world order. This casted
doubt on the portrayal of state involvement as negligible or nonexistent.4 Critics
argued that the state had been edited out, although state institutions, such as the
police, were, in fact, much closer than some studies suggested. This had two import-
ant implications. Anthropologists, once again, began to pay attention to the relation-
ships of local normative orders and that of the state. Besides, the notion of customary
law itself was criticized. Sally Falk Moore (1978a) argued that state law often was
mediated through the relationships and networks in what she called “semi-autono-
mous social fields.” Social fields had internal rules and sanctions that interacted with
the official state regulations that were filtered through the internal normative order.
This publication became the starting point for a new anthropology of law in which
the interrelations between state law, religious law, unofficial law, and customary law
had moved center stage.
American scholars who had previously conducted fieldwork solely outside the US
shifted their research focus to the US. In order to gain insights in disputing processes
in the US,5 they used the lens of legal pluralism in colonial settings. This allowed
them to identify “at home” mechanisms of “informal justice” in places outside of for-
mal courts. Such research suggested that many disputes in the US are dealt with by
way of other-than-state law, within many “rooms” in which justice is extended – or
not, and that disputing parties are frequently engaged in “forum shopping,” a term
260 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

borrowed from private international law (Galanter 1974, 1981). Systematic reflection
on power differentials between parties explained why stronger parties tended to profit
most from the judicial system. Legal anthropologists criticized the lack of mitigating
mechanisms of power differentials in mediation. Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat (1981)
showed that only a minute section of all potential grievances actually reach the courts
and discussed the intervening factors along the trajectory. Resorting to court within a
local community was often seen as an inappropriate response to conflict.
Characteristic for this period in the study of law by anthropologists is the use of
actor-oriented approaches. Later on, interpretative perspectives that paid closer attention
to the discursive and power dimensions of law were used. They focused on the use actors
made of the available laws and legal institutions in plural legal situations. Since economic,
social, and symbolic power relations are differentially inscribed into law, choices from
among legal systems have real consequences. Moreover, not just the disputing parties
resort to forum shopping, but often also institutions dealing with the dispute, depending
on how they stand to gain greater authority (K. von Benda-Beckmann 1981).
In the ensuing years, the inventory of theoretical tools to study legal pluralism,
also in its state-embeddedness, was expanded and its analysis further refined. In con-
flict processing, how problems are framed is largely determined by idiom shopping
and code switching – choosing from among the available legal idioms or discourses.
Those concepts underscored the significance of the findings of interpretive anthropol-
ogy, which understood legal registers as ways of seeing the world. Moreover, gender
studies and feminist anthropology focused, in particular, on the socio-legal produc-
tion of inequalities. The latter strand inspired anthropologists to study gender issues
within the framework of family relations, for instance, in property regimes, or for
ascertaining terms of access to natural resources under conditions of legal pluralism.
Based on this literature, F. von Benda-Beckmann (2000, 153) demonstrated that the
public-private distinctions, fundamental to western political theories and to legal doc-
trines of statehood, failed to appreciate that gendered attributes might be differently
ascribed in other legal orders.
The intellectual environment, within which legal pluralism emerged as a concept,
and began to further develop, took inspiration from the sociological theory of
Anthony Giddens on structuration and his constructivist perspective, from Bourdieu’s
contributions to praxeological theories, and from Foucault’s notions of power and
governmentality. Since the 1990s, governance, significantly, also alludes to normative
activities such as law production by a wide range of public and private organizations,
which include (I)NGOs and corporations. Established as a less controversial concept,
but offering a complementary tool to legal pluralism, eventually, it also proved to be
conducive to the study of interlinkages between legal pluralism and the state.
Governance and legal pluralism have thus stood in a “symbiotic” relationship (Zips
and Weilenmann 2011).

4.2. Critique at “customary law”

Increased emphasis in anthropological research on disputing in colonial settings led
to a reconsideration of the character of customary law. Critical analysis showed that
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 261

customary law, too, was pluralized and transformed over time by colonial state law
and reinvented as neo-tradition. This critique revealed how deeply interwoven dispute
analysis was with state normativity, be it the state as the leviathan against which
informal conflict processing takes shape, or entailing the involvement of state officials
in conflict processing outside the framework of state institutions, often also wearing
the hat of local informal grass roots legal agents. Customary law allowed chiefs
endowed with colonial authority, for instance, to enhance their power and steward-
ship over land at the expense of women’s rights to land (Stewart 2003, 48; Hellum
et al. 2007), a creative, still ongoing practice that entails combining state law
with custom.6
This explains the politics of law, and the entanglement of laws in plural legal
orders, but it is not necessarily the full story. Critics focused too much on state insti-
tutions and political rhetoric, and failed to reflect on the broader range of contexts in
which law is used and where other versions and interpretations might apply. To very
different degrees, all colonial legal orders incorporated customary laws, thereby
assigning to them specific, often truncated interpretations that co-existed and inter-
acted with interpretations developed in other contexts. But most local laws are flex-
ible, context-dependent, and constantly changing in response to state demands, such
as economic development, democracy, or human rights, as well as to general social
and economic developments. When shifting the gaze to actors that bring about the
change, customary law appears not to be entirely made by the state and often is not
even applied in state institutions.7 The relationship between local law and state law
alternates between rapprochement and distancing. Local communities may even
actively choose to adopt state law, erasing almost all traces of legal pluralism. But
local groups may also capture elements of state law and single these out from later
renderings of state law. In the process, these elements become vernacularized and
remain valid in this vernacularized form as local law. Legal pluralism studies estab-
lished that the agency of persons connecting various legal orders was manifold or
plural-legal. Zenker and Hoehne (2018), for instance, call attention to the paradox
that, in their attempts to implement state law, state officials in Africa are obliged to
deal with the logic of customs that is often incompatible with that of state law, in
order to be able to do their work of the state. The translation work of street-level
bureaucrats creates interpretations of law that are not always compatible with official
interpretations. This represents another layer of legal pluralism.8

4.3. The concept of legal pluralism

Deeper insights into disputing processes showed for one, that people in colonial set-
tings often had a choice to opt for one legal system over another, and secondly, that
the state was not a passive onlooker but an active agent in the construction of mul-
tiple legal orders. Thus debate about legal anthropological concepts and categories to
identify and spell out links between normative orders was spurred by a heightened
interest in the state.9 Legal anthropologists now needed an analytical framework to
accommodate a conceptual inclusion of the state, its judiciary and legal institutions
into their analyses of legal situations at local level.
262 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

The legal sociologist Gurvitch (1935) first used legal pluralism to denote co-exist-
ing legal orders. But it was the Belgian lawyer Vanderlinden (1971) who first used
the term in an analytical sense.10 Legal pluralism, according to him, referred to a situ-
ation in which people could choose from among more than one co-existing set of
rules. Legal plurality, by contrast, denoted the co-existence of multiple (sub-)legal sys-
tems within one state, to cater to different categories of persons who had no option
to choose from among these bodies of law. For example, if commercial law was
applicable for merchants, civil law was applicable for other citizens. The term legal
pluralism initially met with considerable resistance and there were opposing views
about what the term law signified. Over the years, many alternative terms were
coined to deal with this discomfort (K. von Benda-Beckmann and Turner forthcom-
ing). The nineteenth-century modernist notion of the nation state as the sole source
of law dominated, whereby only state law and not normative orders deserved to be
labeled as law, as the codified, differentiated, institutionalized and legitimized expres-
sion of the state sovereignty and monopoly of power. This understanding of law con-
tinued to be widely accepted by lawyers, economists, and social and political
scientists throughout the twentieth century. They held that law would otherwise lose
its distinctive meaning. Moore’s publication on the semi-autonomous social field is
often erroneously cited in favor of the term legal pluralism. In fact, she reserved the
term law for state law (Moore 1973). Roberts (1979b, 1998) and Tamanaha (1993)
also shared this opinion, but Tamanaha (2007) made an about-face later on and now
considers any normative order to be law if the participants call it law.
In this context, it is revealing that concepts that presupposed the existence of legal
pluralism were warmly welcomed in academia and did not evoke comparable
polemics, even if they conveyed the same message about the plurality of law. For the
related concept of governance, for instance, it was generally accepted that state insti-
tutions are not the only institutions that produce law. Rather, there is pluralism in
lawmaking beyond the purview of lawmakers who increasingly experience the power
of organized non-state governance intervening in the state’s legislative processes.
Governance is key to the study of the relationship between the state and non-state
lawmaking institutions, as this link sets the stage for broadly acknowledging the exist-
ence of something called global legal pluralism.
John Griffiths’ seminal article of 1986 in this journal that details his analysis of
the trajectories of legal pluralism invited broad criticism. Unfortunately, the article
was incorrectly interpreted as a value judgment that positioned legal pluralism
against the state. Griffiths’ polemic was meant to show lawyers that a state-centric
view of law eclipsed the significance of other kinds of law being used in social inter-
actions; it did not entail a value judgment. Empirical data on plural legal circum-
stances provide neither a positive nor negative content assessment of the respective
legal regimes (see, e.g. Sharafi 2008; Zips and Weilenmann 2011). The critics of legal
pluralism argued that this article represented the eternal bible of all adherents of a
moral anti-state tenet overlooking the considerable diversity among scholars studying
legal pluralism. The objective was rather to address the incompatibility between state
legal dogmatism and empirical challenges, for the ideology does not need an empir-
ical foundation.
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 263

In this period, two main conceptions of legal pluralism proliferated, especially in

debates on the relationship between legal pluralism and the state. Even if scholars who
considered law as standing for state law did not necessarily reject the notion of legal
pluralism, they accommodated legal plurality only if and to the extent the state legal
system recognized other forms of law. Legal pluralism also concerns the various degrees
of plurality. Concepts of legal pluralism that put the state and its domestic law center
stage in plural legal configurations, are labeled as “state,” “weak,” “juristic,” “classic,”
(e.g. A. Griffiths 1986; see also, e.g. J. Griffiths 2002; Sezgin 2004; F. von Benda-
Beckmann 1997), “relative” (Vanderlinden 1989), “lawyer’s” (e.g. Benda-Beckmann
2002, 25), or “legally constructed” (e.g. K. von Benda-Beckmann 2001a, 24). They vary
in how much power and sovereignty are ascribed to the state and to what extent inter-
actions can be allocated to the various normative registers within such configuration.
These positions assert that law must be recognized by the state, that the scope of
“existence” of other-than-state law is defined by the state legal system, and that incorp-
oration of plural legal components into the state system is possible to be achieved. Or
more concretely, legal pluralism is understood here as deriving from the recognition of
one legal system by another legal system – usually that of the nation state. Keebet von
Benda-Beckmann (2001b; see also, Anders 2004) calls this a legal political concept of
legal pluralism that has developed into what scholars interested in law at the trans-
national and global level today understand as “normative legal pluralism.”
However, other scholars considered a state-centric position inconsistent, because
most proponents of this view acknowledged the existence of religious law as law, des-
pite the fact that it was not enacted by the state. It was therefore not appropriate for
the social scientific study of law that aimed at understanding the social working of
law (F. von Benda-Beckmann 1979). The second strand places the formal legal system
principally on a more or less equal footing with all or some of the other legal orders
constituting a plural legal constellation. Here the relationship is qualified, for instance,
as “deep,” “strong,” “real” (J. Griffiths 1986) or as “factual” legal pluralism (Angelo
1996, 1).11 An implicit or explicit agency of diverse legal regimes (customary, religious)
is often assumed. The term “co-existence” then translates into an arrangement of nor-
mative orders, each with its own legitimacy and validity. Here the existence of law irre-
spective of what the state declares to be law is emphasized. People may refer to a
normative register even if it is not recognized by the state.
A focus on the spatial and scalar arrangement of legal pluralism reveals that com-
ponents from “above” and “below” state law may take effect inside a state territory
and interact with state law in various ways. They generate overlapping spaces of
authority, and invite dogmatic analyses of legal content and interpretation of concrete
norms within the legal system. Legal actors “on the ground” quite often reach differ-
ent conclusions about these forms of territorial inclusion of domestic law in plural
legal arrangements from those of state institutions. No coherent system can be
formed as a result; instead only a patchwork of normative components is translated
into the legal landscape (Anders 2004). As Santos (2002, 95) has put it, this gives rise
to a condition of “internal legal pluralism” where it is possible for “different logics of
regulation carried out by different state institutions with very little communication
between them” to co-exist.
264 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

Those who advocate a broad understanding of law emphasized that the term “law”
references a number of categorically different domains. It may signify a science, an
ideology, a technology or a craft, or a cognitive concept as a way of imagining the
real (Geertz 1983). Moore (1978b) pointed to the great variety of social processes in
which law is involved. Interpretation, confirmation, validation and reproduction
occur especially in formalized situations (e.g. tribunals, notary, and administrative
decisions), in the media, education and academia, at the work place, or in informal
communication; social practices generate standardization of action as do other forms
of routinization of social practices. As these routinized and standardized practices
may eventually translate into normativity, law must be viewed as one of the basic
domains of practice of the human existence. As a social institution, it is comparable
to religion, political or economic practice. This requires reflecting on law on a higher
level of abstraction than dogmatic law with its exclusive focus on the state allows for.
It requires abstracting comparative and analytical concepts from the specific – often
western – manifestations from which they derive, an operation that resembles how
kinship and religion have become analytical terms.
Much of the confusion and controversy in the debate results from a lack of refine-
ment and of the specificity of the dimensions in which legal orders differ from each
other. Legal orders differ on several dimensions: degree of regulation, institutionaliza-
tion, differentiation, systematization, modes of sanctioning, spatial and social scope of
validity, and basis of legitimacy. In addition, they can also differ in terms of the num-
ber of concrete norms and principles; they can be codified, written, or oral.12
Comparisons along these diverse lines have shown that there are important common-
alities between state law on the one hand and customary law and other normative
orders on the other, even if other differences are significant. They have also disproved
the claim that state law is by definition more important. Legal pluralism in the
anthropological sense therefore is a sensitizing concept for situations in which people
draw upon several legal systems, irrespective of their status within the state legal sys-
tem. It endorses anthropological findings indicating that, in their social and economic
interactions, people resort to customary, religious law or an unnamed new law, often
mixed with parts of state law, even when the state explicitly denies the validity of
these other kinds of law. Moreover, normatively defined legal pluralisms abound
(Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 2006, 26). All legal systems embody ways of
dealing with other legal systems. In Islamic law, for instance, elaborate regulations
have been put in place to recognize customary law. According to this view, state rec-
ognition of other legal orders – or the lack of it – is a significant indication about
what the normative relationship will be. But that does not fully capture the range of
laws that people actually employ in social interaction. For this, a broad empirical and
comparative concept is necessary that calls attention to the possibility that more than
one legal system could be relevant for social interaction, without claiming that this is
necessarily the case always and everywhere. This view of legal pluralism has been
extremely useful for understanding that constellations of legal pluralism differ widely
in scope and that the relative importance of their components varies. It has served to
study modes of governance and the ways in which power relations are inscribed into
law, and to understand how law regulates access to resources and justice – and the
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 265

lack of it. Situating the state its law, this perspective lays out the specific contexts and
ways in which normative orders are invoked, interpreted, and put into practice, and
shows the dynamics of how law is both maintained and modified along the chains of
interaction, settings and contexts. Alternative concepts, such as polycentrism, legalities
and interlegality, parallel legal orders, nomosphere, hybridity, vernacularization, itera-
tions, law fare, legal diversity, and call attention to specific aspects of legal pluralism.

5. Global dynamics
The end of the twentieth century saw a rise in globalizing economies. This was char-
acterized by mass migration, innovations in transportation and communication tech-
nologies, growing significance of international finance, and the proliferation of
secular and religious transnational organizations. These dynamics affected various
social, political and economic fields and evoked critical tensions in legal environments
between homogenization and hyperspecialization. Global supply chains, natural
resource management and development cooperation, for instance, were increasingly
dominated by the logics of neoliberal normativity. Global governance institutions
increasingly claimed legislative powers on global scale, adding new dimensions to
legal choice making. These developments have generated a wide array of theoretical
work on the role and character of legal pluralism. The most salient issues concerning
the relationship of state and legal pluralism shall be discussed below.
The burgeoning of new forms of governance has compelled social scientists to the-
orize the role and character of the expanding field of transnational organizations, and
thus also the scope of epistemic communities that are in a crucial position to influ-
ence the framing of issues to be regulated. Their norm-setting activities often materi-
alize not so much in explicit rulemaking as in contracts and in standardizing
procedures that define what constitutes admissible evidence. Unequal relations among
epistemic communities, such as among lawyers, technical experts, and economists,
have given rise to legal complexity. Legal pluralism studies have addressed the conun-
drum of unequal power relations for actors defending their rights in fields dominated
by epistemic communities (e.g. Wiber 2005). This required, on the one hand, reconsi-
dering the concept of law in light of the fact that the nation-state had ceased to be
the main source of law; the position of states and the concept of governance had to
be reconsidered (Reyntjens 2015). Theories of relationality, such as actor-network and
assemblage theory, have produced new perspectives in the social sciences and in
socio-legal studies on actors involved in lawmaking.
With a global legal environment replete with lawmaking bodies, the sovereign state
is no longer the sole legislative forum. State law is viewed no less as a bottleneck for
global flows of transnational law in attempts to link above-the-state and below-the-
state legal pluralisms (Helfand 2015, 5). In other words, where lawmaking processes
are pluralized, to a great extent, nation states no longer remain pivotal to law, nor do
they represent the sole legitimate source of lawmaking in every single social and eco-
nomic field. These conditions have finally convinced legal scholars and social scien-
tists to adopt the concept of legal pluralism without relinquishing the significance of
266 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

the state (see, e.g. Berman 2014, 2016; Croce and Goldoni 2015; Michaels 2009, 2013;
Twining 2009).
The proliferation of “particularized normative orders” (Darian-Smith 2013a, 37)
also sparked an interest in the time, space, and scalar dimensions of legal pluralism.
Postfoundational and critical social theories and the theoretical work on transboun-
dary communities has stimulated research on laws conveyed to such new scalar
arrangements, and the changes these undergo in the new socio-economic and legal
contexts. Similarly, such research is confronted with the challenge of viewing the state
from a global perspective, as also embodying a diversity of people, of religious expres-
sions and citizens and migrants desirous of or requiring a high degree of mobility.
Religious law and doctrine crossing national boundaries played a pioneering role in
the formulation of an emerging concept of global legal pluralism. More than the
study of custom, it is the increasingly contested sovereignties of domestic and reli-
gious law that has moved legal pluralism closer to the state in liberal democracies
(Turner and Kirsch 2009). While many predicted the end of the nation state, migra-
tion studies have showed that nation states were far from fading in significance, and
in crucial ways affected the life of migrants (Darian-Smith 2013a, 37).
On a global scale, such dynamics translated into new theoretical deliberations.
Globalizing processes required looking afresh at asymmetrical power relationships
entailed in law (Croce and Goldoni 2015). Postcolonial and subaltern theories as well
as critical approaches to legal orientalism focused on the enduring power differentials
after decolonization and helped to deconstruct the underlying conviction on the
supremacy of Western law (Darian-Smith 2013b; Baxi 2000). Not surprisingly, the
politics of global legal pluralism shows to be deeply involved in neoliberal projects.
They include decentralization, for instance, when powerful actors manipulate legal
registers of vulnerable groups to weaken the validity of claimants’ rights. Other proj-
ects concern democratization, for instance, when the rights of non-majoritarians are
acknowledged. Yet others deal with free trade, where goods and money can freely
move but not people. “Lawfare,” once an instrument of colonial oppression, is now
the “weapon of the weak” to claim resources, recognition, and voice (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009, 37).
Claims to recognition of grassroots law found also expression in constitutional
legal pluralism, especially in Latin American countries (Hoekema 2017).
Paradoxically, one result of such radical legal thinking may be that indigenous cos-
movisional law may be applied in cases where possibly it is the judge and not the
protagonists who considers indigenous legal reflections the most appropriate
to adopt.
The expansion of development cooperation led to a flourishing legal development
industry featuring a host of “law merchants.” Transnational legal templates are traded
around the globe to promote the rule of law and to assist constitution making in
emerging or vulnerable states to ensure compliance with the requirements of trans-
national extraction schemes (Grenfell 2013; Seidel 2017). Such projects often involve
a neo-codification of local forms of normativity to fit the constitutional requirements
similar to what was practiced during colonial times. The problem of legal complexity
is exacerbated by the fact that development agencies often propose new laws on the
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 267

erroneous assumption that they fill a legal void. They also have to navigate between
the legal environments of the donor and the recipient states. The resulting "project
law" compounds the plural legal order that forms the environment for the recipients
of development cooperation.
Legal models travel around the world at an unprecedented pace through a great
variety of channels, pluralizing constellations of legal pluralism at the intersection of
various scales (Behrends et al. 2014). This entails important translation processes.
Some transnational legal models need to be downscaled to the level of the nation
state and below. Human rights, for example, will only be understood and taken up in
practice if they are successfully translated into local discourses and politics (Corradi
et al. 2017). Moreover, global standard setting tools, such as the UN Declaration on
Human Rights, may gradually change their meaning and significance and assume a
new shape within global assemblages of which this hybrid law is but one – internally
fragmented – component. It is not just the vernacularization of human rights on the
ground that adds to legal pluralism; it is more its neoliberal exegesis that takes effect
in global legal pluralism (Goodale 2009). Such neo-standardization endows global law
with new meaning but also re-pluralizes it at a national scale. Strong tendencies
toward a re-nationalization of the nomosphere, in domains such as the legal regula-
tion of migration and of global trade, render global legal pluralism even
more complex.
Other legal models must undergo upscaling, for example, when indigenous rights
acquire a generic meaning within a national legal order or across boundaries in inter-
national law. Studies of such translating processes have called attention to the role of
the intermediating actors and their relations with the recipients and addressees of the
new laws. As Turner (2015) has argued, in order to capture the interconnections of
plural legal constellations and the differences in the scope of the components, multi-
sited and multi-scalar studies appear to be better suited than methodological national-
ism, which presumes the nation state to be the sole “natural” socio-political and legal
unit of reference (Wimmer and Schiller 2003; Sassen 2010).
While social sciences developed an empirically grounded concept of global legal
pluralism, legal studies suggested a postulated normative concept of legal pluralism
(Berman 2014). According to Berman (2014; 2016), such normative pluralism may
pursue either a substantive strategy accommodating diversity, or a proceduralist one
that seeks to manage pluralism under condition of both the fragmented landscape of
legal sovereignties and the project of global legal harmonization. There, non-state law
acknowledges an emerging world legal order that while indicative of the growing sig-
nificance of international law does not imply the diminishing importance of domestic
law. By invoking the term non-state law, these scholars put the interaction and
degrees of the mutually constituting dynamics between the spheres of state and non-
state center stage in research and analysis (Hertogh 2008; Dedek and Praagh 2015;
Helfand 2015; K€ otter et al. 2015).13
Scholars of Science and Technology Studies have shown that we are only begin-
ning to understand the ontological and epistemological challenges posed to the actors
involved (Cadena and Lien 2015). Methodologically, the research focus within legal
anthropology already shifted the units of analysis from codes to (extended) cases and
268 K. VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND B. TURNER

events, situations and contexts. Postfoundational epistemological interest turned its

gaze to legal practice and situated knowledge (Davies 2017). In this line of thought,
the unit of research eventually came to be understood as a complex web of relations
including human and non-human, discursive and other constitutive elements such as
knowledge regimes (e.g. McGee 2014; Pieraccini 2016; Robinson and Graham 2018).

6. Conclusions
We have shown that anthropological analyses of plural legal orders have alternated
between moving towards state law and away from it. This occurred in engagement
with successive social and legal theories and as a result of perceived socio-economic
and political changes. Evolution theory constructed a unilineal development from
“primitive” to modern state law. Structural functionalist theories were so preoccupied
with finding the internal working of the laws they found in the colonies that the state
receded to the background. These studies were based on the theory that law created
order. Anglo-American legal doctrine in the mid-twentieth century, which focused on
case law, the American school of legal realism, and a shift in anthropology to the
study of conflict, narrowed down the study of law to disputes. In European legal
anthropology, the social working of law in the interaction of different legal systems
was at the core of research. Legal pluralism was developed as an analytic tool for that
purpose. The term was criticized on the basis of a modernist view of law. From a
post-colonial perspective, the concept of customary law was also criticized for being
an invention of the colonial state, though customary law was not purely a state inven-
tion. In the late twentieth century, actor-oriented theories, social constructivism,
interpretative theories, relational approaches, and network theories diverted attention
to the contexts in which law was deployed in social interaction. This again brought
the state into sharper relief. Globalization theories at the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury have spawned interest not only in transnational networks and production chains
but also in legal transfers and the translation processes at different scale. Skepticism
towards the concept of legal pluralism vanished in general. Multi-scalar and multi-
sited studies repositioned the state as one of the sources of law, amongst many, at
both the transnational and sub-national levels. Analyzing the co-transformative proc-
esses to which the concept of the state itself was subjected in these developments
would be beyond the purview of this article. Suffice it to say that the concept of the
state today is a far cry from the twentieth century ideal of a sovereign nation state.
An epistemological insight provided through the use of the analytical concept of legal
pluralism is that any sort of plural legal configuration eventually engages or is
entangled with statehood, whether it is about co-opting, bypassing, neglecting, accom-
modating, or merging. Eventually, the acceptance of global legal pluralism has resus-
citated the significance of the state in its present fragmented and dependent guise in
complex plural legal assemblages.

Notes
1. We discuss the literature selectively and cannot do justice to each individual author’s
view on the relationship between state law and legal pluralism in relation to the social
 THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM AND UNOFFICIAL LAW 269

theory in play to the full extent. We have selected those authors that are of particular
relevance for the question how legal pluralism deals with the state.
2. Nader 1965,7; Turner 2004; Tuori 2013; K. v. Benda-Beckmann and Turner, forthcoming.
3. Nader and Todd 1978; Engel 1980; Merry 1979.
4. Hooker 1975,52; Bohannan 1965; Moore 1970.
5. See for an overview over this literature Albiston et al. 2014.
6. Oomen 2005; Hellum and Derman 2009; James 2006.
7. K. von Benda-Beckmann 1984; Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 2011; Goodale
and Merry 2007; Ubink 2011; Gebeye 2017, 240.
8. F. von Benda-Beckmann 2002; See for further details K. von Benda-Beckmann and
Turner, forthcoming.
9. K. von Benda-Beckmann and Turner, forthcoming.
10. Gilissen 1971; Van den Berghe 1973; Reyntjens 2015, 347–349.
11. See for references K. von Benda-Beckmann and Turner, forthcoming.
12. Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 2006; Woodman 1998, 44; and John Griffiths
2017 conceptualise law in terms of social control.
13. The currently preferred expression ‘non-state law’ was used in anthropology in
connection with legal pluralism as a catch-all-but-state-law term every now and then
since the early research period; see, e.g., Merry 1988.

Acknowledgement
We thank the special issue editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments
and suggestions and Gita Rajan for careful language editing.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

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