Abstract

POOLE, Deborah. The uses of custom. Towards a juridical anthropology of the Neoliberal State. Alteridades [online]. 2006, vol.16, n.31, pp.9-21. ISSN 2448-850X.

This paper offers some reflections about sovereignty and law in the context of neoliberalism, using ethnographic examples from Mexico and Peru. It suggests that recent judicial reforms have rearticulated both official and popular conceptions of territorial and jurisdictional limits, and of the law and the state. Both anthropologists and indigenous organizations have viewed these reforms as a conquest of political and legal space from the state. Yet without denying that political and social struggles have achieved changes in the law, it is important to ask what kind of vision of a state, and of law, made these openings to local autonomy possible. In this paper I offer theoretical and ethnographic reflections about the discourse of pluralism as used by politicians and neoliberal reformers. I suggest that legal anthropology has much to contribute to theoretical analysis of spaces of state legal decision. On the other hand, the study of the institutional and discursive spaces that constitute “the state” can also help us to rethink how we use concepts such as locality, margin, autonomy and pluralism within anthropology.

Keywords : State; custom; neoliberalism; anthropology.

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