Law’s Religion: An Introduction

Document Type

News Article

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

In Theory From the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, Jean and John Comaroff consider the juridification of history and politics in the “endemically policultural” postcolonial South, and ask the question, “why the fetishism of law?” “[T]he language of legality,” they offer, “affords people in policultural nation-states an ostensibly neutral medium to make claims on each other and on the state, to enter into contractual relations, to transact unlike values, and to deal with conflicts arising out of them. In so doing, it produces an impression of consonance amidst contrast: of the existence of universal standards that, like money, facilitate the negotiation of incommensurables across otherwise intransitive boundaries” (78-79).

Publication Title

The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere

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