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ÉTUDES ET ESSAIS

Penser le temps culturel du droit

Le destin anthropologique du concept de coutume
Louis Assier-Andrieu
p. 67-90

Abstracts

Thinking the Cultural Time of Law. The Anthropological Destiny of the Concept of Custom. -- Related for a long time to rural or primitive themes, the concept of custom is being revived in the field of "social questions", where it continues its quite paradoxical destiny laden with a variety of ways of conceiving of group identities over time and in terms of the law. This concept, a subject of legal thought for centuries, runs through theories, innerves historical and political analysis at its core and along its edges, and has attended the genesis of social and cultural anthropology. As the main access for non-jurists to the legal field, custom has set conceptual limits of antidogmatic and antisubstantive approaches to law. This polysemous concept refers to the postulated essences of both law and culture, the latter thus taken to be universal. It also conveys the notion of ethnic and social diversity, and can serve as the vector of a national unification grounded therein. Light is shed on the theoretical and historical settings of the paradoxical elements contained in a concept that harbors a doctrine of substantive law, as well as radical criticism of it, and an anthropological alternative to legal thought.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Louis Assier-Andrieu, “Penser le temps culturel du droit”L’Homme, 160 | 2001, 67-90.

Electronic reference

Louis Assier-Andrieu, “Penser le temps culturel du droit”L’Homme [Online], 160 | octobre-décembre 2001, Online since 12 June 2003, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/125; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.125

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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