CRASSH

‘Detachment’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are core principles valued in legal spheres. Henry Maine (1866) argued that modern law entailed a shift from the socially embedded partiality of status, to more detached forms of legal contract. Yet despite such perceptions of detachment, legal regimes today forge new forms of relationality and social engagement at every turn. The legitimacy of many legal practices thus involves the assertion of a complex combination of both ideals. In a range of ethnographic contexts, this panel will explore how legal forms of distance and connection are engendered, and what new subjectivities and relations are enabled. Legal parishioners may attempt to detach the law from other domains such as politics, kinship, religion or even popular moral debate. Simultaneously, they may attempt to reconcile such separations, declaring the law too aloof or removed from social ‘reality’. Rituals of law commonly entail the complex separation of forms of evidence, arguments, grievances, actors and expert opinions from one another. At other moments the law’s efficacy requires such forms to be forged together into a seamless, persuasive whole. Through enactments and extensions of the law, citizens, individuals and subjects are created who are variously detached from and linked to structures of power, such as nation-states, NGOs, ‘civil society’ or community leaders. At other times, actors call for the law to be detached from personal life, decrying in the name of personal choice and freedom the extension of legal regulation into the realms of the family, the private and the intimate. In a variety of contexts, this panel seeks to address themes of detachment and engagement within legal regimes, exploring how the law detaches, (re)constitutes or (re)connects relations in ways that are both socially meaningful and politically powerful.