Law and Anthropology in the Netherlands: From Adat Law School to Anthropology of Law

This chapter offers an overview of the Dutch tradition of legal anthropology as it developed from the Adat Law School of the early twentieth century, especially from the contributions of its leading member, Cornelis van Vollenhoven. It begins with a brief sketch of the precursors of the Adat Law School, then traces the development of the Dutch tradition from the work of Van Vollenhoven and his colleagues to that of later scholars, showing how, in the last two decades of the colonial era, research on adat law became an ever more conservative and shallow legal science. The second part of the chapter focuses on the emerging Dutch anthropology of law after 1950, describing its institutional bases and emphasizing its increasing embeddedness in international debates. It also discusses some of the conceptual problems posed by the Indonesian indigenous rights movement, which draws both on international legal concepts and on concepts developed by the Adat Law School.

An alternative conceptualization of indigenous rights in Africa under the international human rights law framework

<p>This article is a practice-based elucidation of how indigenous rights can be securely protected and implemented in the broader human rights discourse. The concept of indigeneity is contested in many African countries with the primary question being: Who is indigenous? The ‘politics of recognition’ have stalled the work of the African indigenous rights movement thus far and this paper builds upon the discourse on Indigenous rights, making a proposition towards an effective machinery to facilitate their protection. Therefore, the focus is to construct a different perspective which emphasizes the need to utilize, develop and improve the existent human rights machinery. This is done through the reconceptualization of indigenous rights by utilizing the ethno-cultural protections machinery. In the last part of this article I look at the San peoples in Zimbabwe as a representative case study to bring into perspective the lived realities of indigenous peoples in Africa.</p><p><strong>Received</strong>: 28 June 2018<br /><strong>Accepted</strong>: 23 October 2018<br /><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2018</p>