Permutations of Order: Religion and Law As Contested Sovereignties

Permutations of Order makes an innovative and important contribution to current discussions about the relationship between religion and law, bringing together theoretically informed case studies from different parts of the world, relating to various types of politico-legal settings and religions. This volume also deals with contemporary legal/religious transfigurations that involve "permutations," meaning that elements of "legal" and "religious" acts of ordering are at times repositioned within each realm and from one realm to the other. These permutations of order in part result from the fact that, in ethnographic settings like those examined here, "legal" and "religious" realms are relational to-and in certain cases even constitutive of-each other and they result in categoric transpositions and new social positionalities through which, among other things, "the legal" and "the religious" are blended. Permutations of Order is a work that transcends convention, identifies new and theoretically overarching themes and will be of strong interest to researchers and policy-makers seeking a comparative focus on the intersections and disjunctions of religion and law.

Dr Thomas G. Kirsch is Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Between 1993 and 2001, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia. He has published two books on African Christianity (one of them entitled Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity; Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books; 2008). Since 2003, he has also conducted ethnographic fieldwork on issues of human safety, security and crime prevention in South Africa. Dr Bertram Turner is senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. He was assistant professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology and African Studies in Munich between 1993 and 2001, where he taught anthropology with a special focus on religion and legal anthropology. He has held university teaching positions in Munich and Leipzig. He has been conducting fieldwork in Morocco since 1996 with a specific focus on the management of natural resources, Islamic activism and conflict settlement in a plural legal setting.