Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00108 |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
IN THE SHADOW OF MARRIAGE: GENDER AND JUSTICE IN AN
AFRICAN COMMUNITY
by A.M.O. GRIFFITHS
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, ix and 310 pp., £39.95 (hbk.)
and £15.25 (pbk.))
Dr Anne Griffiths’s book In the Shadow of Marriage is the fruit of many
years of lecturing and research in Botswana. It is drawn specifically from
her fieldwork amongst the Bakwena people (at their central village of
Molepolole) which she began in 1982 and followed up with two further
studies in 1984 and 1989.
Griffiths’s book is a welcome addition to the two main ethnographic
accounts of customary law in Botswana, since both I. Schapera, Handbook
of Tswana Law and Custom (1938) and S. Roberts, A Restatement of African
Law: Botswana I: Tswana Family Law (1972) are now dated. Her contri-
bution to the subject goes beyond merely updating existing information,
however, for the main purpose of Griffiths’s book is to advocate a particular
theoretical perspective on the subject.
Griffiths sets out to expose the fallacies implicit in the paradigm of ‘legal
centralism’, and undermining this paradigm is in fact a dominant theme of
her book.1The centralist perspective assumes a clear distinction between
legal and non-legal norms (the former having an overriding authority over
the latter) and the strict neutrality of law in its dealings with individuals.2
It follows that those writing in the legal centralist tradition have tended to
concentrate their attention on the formal law and its sources. Their emphasis
has led in turn to distinguishing between customary and common (or statute)
law and between legally recognized courts and other unofficial forums.
Dissatisfaction with this view of law is not, of course, new. An earlier
milestone in the theory of legal anthropology, which posed a substitute para-
digm, was J.L. Comaroff and S. Roberts, Rules and Processes: the cultural
logic of dispute in an African context (1981). This book was also based
on fieldwork amongst the Batswana (more specifically the Bakgatla and
Barolong-Tshidi), and it too advocated a shift from the orthodox ‘rule
centred’ view of law to one that dissolved accepted conceptual boundaries.
From the authors’ stress on the dynamics of process, new ways were
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
650
Book Reviews
1Hence, the title, although evocative of R.N. Mnookin and L. Kornhauser ‘Bargaining in the
shadow of the law: the case of divorce’ (1979) 32 Current Legal Problems 65 and (1979) 88
Yale Law J. 950, does not do justice to the other themes explored by the author.
2 These issues are crisply stated at pp. 16–17.
To continue reading
Request your trial