Legal Anthropology: Methodologies and Contributions to Legal Studies
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Abstract
Legal anthropology is an interdisciplinary approach that integrates legal studies with anthropology; it examines legal phenomena through anthropological concepts, theories, and research methodologies. This article highlights the limitations of traditional legal studies that focus solely on legal texts and formal legal institutions, as they cannot comprehensively explain complex social phenomena. It advocates for an anthropological approach to legal studies, employing methodologies such as ethnography and the analysis of individuals' life narratives to overcome and complement the limits of conventional legal scholarship. These methods help reveal the relationship between law and the everyday lives of people across diverse social groups. This article demonstrates that using such an approach can help expand the scope of legal studies to cover various social institutions, as well as explain both formal and informal legal phenomena more closely aligned with reality. Therefore, this approach has significant contributions to the legal scholarship and fosters new understandings of the role of law in complex societies.
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