1st Edition
African Customary Justice Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Public Ethics
- Introduction: Living Law, Public Ethics and Legal Pluralism
- Looking Back: Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law in a Tswapong Village
- Tlholego: Nature, Culture and Destiny
- The Oracular Court of Sedimo vs. the Customary Court
- An Unburied Past: Chiefly Succession and the Politics of Memory
- What’s in a Name? The Struggle for Identity in Statutory Courts
- Divorce as Process, Botswana Style: Customary Courts and Gender Activism
- Adultery as Process, Botswana Style: Gender and Changing Customary Law
PART ONE: PUBLIC ETHICS AND LEGAL PLURALISM
PART TWO: LEGAL SUBJECTIVITIES, ETHICS AND PLURALISM
9. Inheritance as Turmoil: From Citizens’ Forum to Magisterial Justice
10. A Case of Insult: Emotions, Law and Witchcraft Accusations
11. A Moral Economy of Crime and the Proportionality of Punishment
12. Conclusion: Customary Law as Living Law, Legal Pluralism and Public Ethics
Biography
Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, UK. She has published extensively on Law and Anthropology.
Richard Werbner is Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology, Honorary Research Professor in Visual Anthropology, the University of Manchester, sometime Senior Post- Doctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution, Senior Fellow (National Humanities Center), Overseas Professor (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka). He has recently given the Elliot P. Skinner Memorial Lecture for the Association for Africanist Anthropology, the Royal African Society Lecture, and the Jackman Lectures.
"This book makes an important and highly valuable contribution to a renewed interest and multifaceted debate on justice-seeking in the legally plural contexts of African postcolonies and beyond. It does so through a complex and very nuanced study of legal proceedings in Botswana that have played out in different customary and state courts as well as religious fora over the past 50 years. Written by renowned and long-established experts in the field with an exceptional depth of personal experience of the local dynamics and complexities, the book makes an important theoretical case for combining jurisprudential debates on public ethics with a study of living laws within the normative pluralities characterising not only the postcolony, but increasingly also the world at large."
Olaf Zenker, Chair of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
