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22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 869 (1988)
Legal Pluralism

handle is hein.journals/lwsocrw22 and id is 873 raw text is: LEGAL PLURALISM SALLY ENGLE MERRY I. INTRODUCTION The intellectual odyssey of the concept of legal pluralism moves from the discovery of indigenous forms of law among re- mote African villagers and New Guinea tribesmen to debates con- cerning the pluralistic qualities of law under advanced capitalism. In the last decade, the concept of legal pluralism has been applied to the study of social and legal ordering in urban industrial socie- ties, primarily the United States, Britain, and France. Indeed, given a sufficiently broad definition of the term legal system, vir- tually every society is legally plural, whether or not it has a colo- nial past. Legal pluralism is a central theme in the reconceptual- ization of the law/society relation. Early twentieth century studies examined indigenous law ways among tribal and village peoples in colonized societies in Af- rica, Asia, and the Pacific. Social scientists (primarily anthropolo- gists) were interested in how these peoples maintained social order without European law (e.g., Malinowski, 1926). As they docu- mented the rich variety of social control, social pressure, custom, customary law, and judicial procedure within small-scale societies, these anthropologists gradually realized that colonized peoples had both indigenous law and European law. Colonial law was re- shaping the social life of these villages and tribes in subtle ways, even when it seemed remote. Indeed, as Chanock observed for co- lonial Africa, The law was the cutting edge of colonialism, .. (1985: 4). Tribes and villages had some law developed over the generations on to which formal rational law was imposed by the European colonial powers. The imposed law, forged for industrial capitalism rather than an agrarian or pastoral way of life, embod- ied very different principles and procedures. Scholars termed these situations legal pluralism. They recognized that the intro- duction of European colonial law created a plurality of legal orders but overlooked, to a large extent, the complexity of previous legal orders. For the proponents of empire in the nineteenth century, this imposition of European law was a great gift, substituting civilized This article was completed in February, 1988 and covers literature from 1978 to early 1988. I am grateful to Peter Fitzpatrick, John Griffiths, Christine Harrington, Robert Hayden, Stuart Henry, and June Starr for helpful sugges- tions and comments on earlier drafts. LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Volume 22, Number 5 (1988)

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