Bronisław Malinowski's Concept of Law from the Native's Point of View: A Workshop Held on 12-13 September 2014 in Krakow, Poland
Abstrakt
Bronisław Malinowski is one of the few Central Europeans whose ideas have had a significant impact on 'Western' academia. That was almost 90 years ago.
Some people say that he actually belongs to the British tradition and that he is somewhat of an exception, since no other scholar from Central Europe has ever achieved the same relevance in the social sciences. But the opposite appears to be true if we focus on law as the primary subject of social enquiry.
The workshop entitled 'Malinowski's Concept of Law from the Native's Point of View' attempted to look at the issue from this perspective. The event was organised to commemorate the 130th anniversary of Malinowski's birth by the Department of Sociology of Law at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland), and the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati (Spain), represented by Adam Czarnota.
This unique interdisciplinary forum brought together scholars and researchers from Poland, the United States, Spain, and the Czech Republic (although the largest number of participants came from Polish institutions), representing four disciplinary traditions: the sociology of law, legal science, the anthropology of law, and political theory. The event was organised around the idea that whereas Malinowski's views on religion, magic, totemism, and culture occupy a prominent place in the social sciences, his studies on law are less noticed and less discussed, and this part of his oeuvre has yet to be fully recapitulated.
The workshop's aim was thus to create an interdisciplinary space to discuss this usually overlooked theme.
