ABOUT BOOK

This chapter reflects on what materiality-inflected methodologies1 can bring to ~an anthropology of law, and to legal studies more generally. Its starting point is an ~increasing attention across the social sciences and humanities for objects, and thinking ~beyond the human. These have often, but not only, emerged from science and ~technology studies (STS), to which we pay particular attention. However, approaches ~to materiality have themselves become diversified, and their implications for law can ~similarly be read in multiple ways. At the same time, legal anthropology has helped to ~re-characterise the complexity of law as a field of social activity by paying attention ~to its meanings, for actors within as well as outside its own institutions; to its modes of ~action in practice, again within its explicitly designated spaces as well as its everyday; ~to its unexpected forms, patterns and directions; to its multiplicity and uncertainty. ~Approaches within a broadly defined ‘legal anthropology’ agenda have provided tools ~to move away from grand and removed theorisation of the law, or an exclusive attention ~to its own claims, and towards a subtler understanding of law as a relatively fluid, ~changing and uncertain set of practices. While doing so, legal anthropology has also ~reminded us of the significance of empirical research to identify and theorise the ~complex existences of law, a contribution which echoes some of the implications of ~materiality-oriented theories.