Journal of Legal Anthropology

We explore judges’ approaches to asylum court appeals based on the issue of conversion from Islam to Christianity. Our court ethnography in Germany and Austria in 2018 and 2019 provides an insight into how such claims are discussed during appeals. At the time, they were increasingly common, especially concerning Iranians and Afghans involved in ‘free churches’ (e.g. Evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic). We show how rumours, congregations’ reputations and assumptions about baptism and what genuine conversions entail are discussed. These factors can not only influence appellants’ cases, but reveal church–state tensions and some of the intractable challenges of refugee status determination.

This article argues that how sex appears in the law shapes what erotic pleasure is in a commercial context, and indirectly produces sex workers’ ideas about the moral stakes of engaging in certain acts. Although Japan's anti-prostitution law was intended to eliminate commercial sex, the state's mid-century attempt to define a proscribed site of sexual pleasure centered on intercourse instead led to the proliferation of erotic services in a diversified marketplace. The efforts of cisheteronormative sex industry businesses to navigate the actual conditions of the law's enforcement have in turn made intercourse a distinctive site of concern for many sex workers, who regard it as the basis of an imagined moral hierarchy within the industry and as representing the inability of their workplaces to protect them.

This article addresses different approaches to the spate of home repossessions experienced in Spain after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. It considers the diverging ways in which various involved actors – legislators setting regulatory frameworks, debt advisors from governmental and non-governmental agencies, judges ruling on repossession procedures, anti-repossession movements advocating debt refusal and the ‘self-defence’ of the right to housing – have reacted to the housing crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork developed in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the article considers that a vindicatory approach, one that incorporates moral ideas of justice, informed some of these diverging reactions over and against the orthodox stance that the obligation to repay is absolute. The vindicatory understanding of justice advocates favouring debtors by taking into account their new circumstances and repairing the social harm inflicted on them.

Follow the Relationship: A Note on Jatin Dua's Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean

Protection Recaptured: Reflections on Jatin Dua's Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean

Protection's Possibility: On Histories and Geographies of Concepts

Werbner, Richard. (2020), Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Alexander L. Fattal (2018), Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).