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Contested States explores how men and women invoke law in their struggles to resist gender, racial, ethnic, religious and class-based domination. The essays in this collection vividly demonstrate people's capacity to rework the content, meaning and processes of law. The book examines how hegemony is created and facilitated through law, as well as how subordinate peoples use legal arenas to resist oppression.
The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, offer rich historical and ethnographic detail as they engage these themes in such contexts as: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda, and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the historical and contemporary United States. Contested States extends the growing concern with power and social process in legal studies and argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability. The book demonstrates that theoretical insights learned in legal arenas can deepen overall understanding of sociocultural order and the processes of historical and legal change.
