Reading legal ethnographies to re-map legal pluralism: a Pospisilian corrective to the prevailing dichotomous description of Afghanistan’s legal order

Abstract

This article explores several ethnographies (both academic and para-academic) of Afghanistan’s traditional justice (jirgas and shuras) in order to illuminate contrasts of their conceptual approaches at different periods of the country’s history. In this genealogy we identify ethnographic observations of the levels at which various sociolegal authorities operate and which often elude standard international ontology. The article takes the legal ethnographies as signposts for a conceptual reframing of the legal situation in the country by drawing upon Pospisil’s legal-anthropological conceptual approach which offers an alternative to generic global legal models based on binary oppositions such as formal–informal, state–non-state or official–traditional. This reinterpretation achieves a more accurate non-dualistic understanding of Afghanistan’s traditional justice at the ethnographic micro-level. The discussion of Afghanistan’s legal ethnographies leads to renewed insights into Pospisil’s anthropological theory of law.