The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is one of the world’s leading centres for research in socio-cultural anthropology. Common to all research projects at the Institute is the comparative analysis of social change; it is primarily in this domain that its researchers contribute to anthropological theory, though many programmes also have applied significance and political topicality.
Of the Institute’s three Departments, Max Planck Law is connected with the ‘Law and Anthropology’ Department headed by Professor Marie-Claire Foblets. Established in March 2012, the ‘Law & Anthropology’ Department’s point of departure is the observation that values and norms today are circulating ever more vigorously among diverse societies and cultures. With this intensification of exchanges and encounters comes an increasing demand for translation between different legal orders at various levels of decision making all over the world. This demand engages, among others, the disciplines of social anthropology and law. It requires them not only to confront their own serious epistemological and conceptual constraints, each from its own perspective, but also to examine the extent to which scholars of the disciplines in question can and should take responsibility for the impact and the effects these translations may have in practice.
The Department seeks to further these developments by combining the contributions to the study of law (both at the theoretical level and in terms of legal practice) made by anthropology, with its intrinsic concern for the culturally embedded nature of any normative ordering, with those made by jurisprudence in order to come to an empirically informed analysis of socio-legal processes. With this approach, the Department commits its research agenda to a concept of law in society that takes account both of the rule- and precedent-based approach commonly adopted in jurisprudence and legal studies, and the social anthropological approach to normativity, broadly defined.