CFP: Law, Custom, and the Commensurability of Decidability in Africa and Beyond

Working title: Law, Custom, and the Commensurability of Decidability in Africa and Beyond

There are many examples in anthropology and socio-legal studies of the combination of state law and regulation with "traditional" or "customary" practices to address contemporary social problems. For example, a pre-Colonial dispute resolution practice has been formalized in Rwanda and used to try thousands of genocide suspects, and in countries like The Gambia, "customary" and Islamic financial practices are brought into private law. These systems are not simply the result of multiple processes emerging organically and co-existing, but rather are "governed" by state and non-state actors as processes framed as "more inclusive" (and, hence, "better") of forms of authority often seen as marginalized by the modern postcolonial state. In this vein, the intersection between "customary" and state law has been a recurring motif in the anthropology of Africa. It has drawn our attention to how customary practices are rendered legible by state legal frameworks which are typically heavily indebted to a European model; what is left out of these processes; and how different modes of legality do or do not coexist in specific jurisdictions (viz. "legal pluralism").
Beyond simply highlighting the interplay between law/regulation and custom, however, this session aims to reconsider this intersection by examining, across a variety of contemporary examples, the conditions that make a legal or regulatory matter decidable: that is, how an issue is defined as capable of being addressed through an easily identifiable procedure that will provide a set answer. We are specifically interested in exploring how ways of making decisions, rendering predictions, circumscribing evidence, and establishing connections, are made to seem discrete (as properly "legal" or properly "customary," for example) or, conversely, how they are subordinated to one another. Our central concern, which we consider across a range of case studies, etc), is thus not how modalities of law and regulation differ, but how they are made to seem distinct yet at the same time commensurable.
If you are interested in participating in this session or have any questions, please email (preferably with an abstract but at the very least a sentence or two describing the paper) the organizers (Niklas Hultin, at nhultin1@swarthmore.edu and Kristen Doughty at kdoughty@sas.upenn.edu) as soon as possible, or at the very latest by March 29. The AAA deadline is April 1. We are especially keen on including case studies beyond sub-Saharan Africa, but all types of papers are welcome.