Law and Anthropology Series – Postliberal Legal Anthropology: Toward the Anthropology of Legal Form

Amid converging global crises, the global legal order is undergoing a period of profound transformation. In response, legal anthropologists are revisiting a question that in recent decades they sought to evade: What is law? In this talk, I describe an emerging turn in legal anthropology that examines legal form. While anthropologists studying legal form adopt diverse analytical approaches, I focus on the aesthetic qualities of legal form—the material, sensory, and symbolic conditions through which ‘law’ is represented, recognized, and resisted. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with movements claiming ‘the right to food’ within shifting multi-stakeholder spaces, I argue that these aesthetic dimensions of legal form offer a framework for understanding how law shapes and reconstitutes politics and power relations. Through examining how activists navigate the postliberal forms of governance, I demonstrate how attention to legal form provides critical insights into the shifting normative organization of power in the contemporary global legal landscape.

Speaker: Dr. Matthew Canfield is Assistant Professor of Law & Anthropology at Leiden University. Drawing on ethnographic methods, his research examines the law and governance of food security. Located at the intersection of human rights, transnational governance, and agro-environmental politics, he is interested in the ways that social movements and civil society are mobilizing rights to shape food systems governance.

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