Journal of Legal Anthropology

This article analyzes a series of litigations that began with the Aguinda v. Texaco Inc. case as a site of production of new legal subjectivities for indigenous communities in the region of the Ecuadorian Amazon polluted by oil extraction activities. They engage in the transnational and local legal structures, contribute to and generate legal and scientific knowledge and expertise, and articulate multiple legal subjectivities that position them not only as homogenous plaintiffs in a highly publicized lawsuit, but also as legal actors in complex relation to each other, and to the state. Through such engagements with this legal process, indigenous actors are recrafting their collective representations in ways that challenge the ‘ecoprimitive’ stereotypes of indigeneity, historically associated with the ‘paradox of primitivism.’

In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, incisive popular discourses of corruption posit a mutually beneficial relationship between ‘legitimate’ institutions and organised criminality, a dynamic believed to enable pervasive transformations in the city’s industrial and financial infrastructures. This article situates this local discourse within the wider body of anthropological work on South Asian corruption, noting a discursive departure from the hegemonic, personalised and essentially provincialising corruption models encountered by many researchers. The article interrogates the popular model of crime and corruption in Jamshedpur through a focus upon the business practices of local violent entrepreneurs, exploring the extent to which their negotiations with corrupt institutions and ‘legitimate’ capital may indeed inform their successes. Drawing analytic cues from material on organised crime in the former USSR, this article identifies a mutually beneficial relationship between political influence, violence and industrial capital in an Indian company town.

Ceuta is a Spanish city in Northern Morocco. It is thus situated at a European Union border on the African continent. In this context, I contend that migration is generally considered a potential threat to the pacified local order of things by the Christian majority. In order to protect this order of things referred to as convivencia, Christian Ceutíes tend to prefer depoliticizing strategies to manage migration. Nonetheless, migration sometimes becomes highly politicized and is framed as a security issue. This essay thus suggests that the concept of securitization is relevant to grasp the problematization of migration in times of crisis in Ceuta and analyzes three occurrences of local processes of securitization.

For immigration authorities, the goal of asylum hearings is to differentiate between economic migrants and legitimate political asylum seekers. However, in the stories asylum seekers tell, these categories often blur. Nevertheless, the asylum process uses this differentiation to conceal inequities in the system, and to justify denials. This article examines political asylum as a transnational and culturally local process and argues that contradictions between protection and control underlie some of the seemingly absurd denials of asylum applications.

Maddening Legalities

subjectivities and the law

Pitarch, Pedro, Shannon Speed and Xochitl Leyva Solano (eds.). 2008. Human rights in the Maya region: Global politics, cultural contentions, and moral engagements. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4313-4, x + 377 pp, $23.95

Latour, Bruno (2010 [2002]) The Making of Law. An Ethnography of the Counseil d’État. Polity Press. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3985-7