Conference Review
Legal Knowledge and Anthropological Engagement: A Conference in Honour of Marilyn Strathern
3-4 October 2008
Summary Abstract
The conference was organised to mark Professor Marilyn Strathern’s retirement from William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology. Rather than attempting to cover the diverse topics on which Professor Strathern has worked, the organisers decided to focus the conference on her abiding interest in law and legal knowledge to indicate research and teaching projects that will continue beyond her retirement in Cambridge. As such, the spirit of the conference was forward-looking rather than retrospective, and most presenters were early- or mid-career scholars. The keynote lecture was delivered by Professor Annelise Riles (Cornell) on relational knowledge in legal theory and its interfaces with anthropology in the ethnographic study of Japanese financial markets. Speakers from the UK, US and Australia had been invited to four thematic panels, whose titles were ‘Transforming Law in Melanesia and beyond’; ‘Anthropology and Obligations: Humanitarianism beyond Human Rights’; ‘”Conflict Resolution” and the Auditing of Social Relations under International Law’; and ‘Rights to Research?: Anthropology, Academia and the New Institutionalism’.
Event Report
The organizers’ interest in the interfaces between anthropological and legal knowledge sought to engage a key question in Marilyn Strathern’s work: how do forms of knowledge come to appear as general or particular in their capacity to contribute to human understanding? Description at the heart of anthropological analysis no longer appears as a source of knowledge that is more particular than, for instance, the contentions of legal theory. Yet the effects of scaling on truth claims remain evident, not least in the persistence of global and local as the conventions by which the proportions of claims are judged. This conference asked, with reference to legal knowledge and practice, how anthropology resists such conventions in its contributions to contemporary debates inside and outside academia.
Modernist legal thinking, as Strathern has observed, at once opens up and closes down the capacity to envisage relations. While law and biotechnology, for example, appear compatible in a way that law and kinship do not, the anthropologist’s challenge is often to keep in view the propensity of law to be many things at once. It can be a source of conceptual resources through which people define problems of ownership and rights, it can spur them to intervene in disputes, it gives grounds for advocacy, and so on. The instances of ethnography considered at this conference were accordingly diverse: humanitarianism; international organizations’ involvement in ‘conflict resolution’; ‘law’ in Melanesia; and ethics and research governance.
The conference was generally considered a success. An attentive audience of about 100 persons coming from a number of institutions in the UK, US and Europe engaged in lively discussions at the end of every session. All papers were original and will be published in journals or edited volumes. The diversity of panel themes prevented the organizers from publishing their papers as a single volume.
