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Part of the Spring 2019 Middle Eastern and North African Studies Colloquium Series

In the present talk, anthropologist Paul Dresch explores the nature of such texts and their importance. Their contents (and indeed their existence) have a certain intrinsic interest, of course. Their vocabulary is at points archaic; reading them poses broader problems of interpretation that textualists and anthropologists share. But beyond all of this, and beyond Middle Eastern Studies, they exemplify a view of law and society very different from that of Europe’s state-centered, top-down jurisprudence, and on this score they deserve attention from anthropologists, historians, and theorists of law.
We shall start by introducing the sources, then explain some of the principles that inform what the sources state. We can then say something of what needs bringing to the texts to make sense of them. (As any anthropologist will tell you, we have to half-understand what is going on before we can follow what is being said). Time allowing, we can then try to set out how radically the assumptions of this tradition of law differ from those of our own state-centered world and from its claims to truth and justice.
Bio
Paul Dresch is an Emeritus Research Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He has worked in the Gulf and elsewhere, but mainly in Yemen. His publications include Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989), A History of Modern Yemen (2000) and The Rules of Barat; tribal documents from Yemen (2006), as well as edited volumes on other topics.