NUMBER 53/54 / 2006

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Franz von Benda-Beckmann is a head of the Project Group ‘Legal Pluralism’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Since 2002 he has been honorary professor of legal anthropology at the University of Leipzig and since 2004 honorary professor of legal pluralism at the University of Halle/Saale. He holds a Ph.D. in law (1970) and obtained his habilitation in anthropology at the University of Zurich (1979). Before 2000 he was professor for law in developing countries at the Agricultural University Wageningen. He has done fieldwork and supervised research in Malawi, West Sumatra, the Moluccas and Nepal. He has written and co-edited several books and published widely on issues of property rights, social (in)security and legal pluralism in developing countries and on legal anthropological theory. He co-edited together with Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths Mobile People, Mobile Law. Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; and with Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber Changing Properties of Property, Oxford: Berghahn, 2006.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is a head of the Project Group ‘Legal Pluralism’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Since 2003 she has been honorary professor of legal anthropology at the University of Leipzig, and since 2004 honorary professor of legal pluralism at the University of Halle/Saale. She also holds a personal chair in anthropology of law at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She has carried out research in West Sumatra and on the Moluccan Island of Ambon, Indonesia and among Moluccan women in the Netherlands. She has published extensively on dispute resolution, social security in developing countries, property and water rights, decentralisation, and on theoretical issues in the anthropology of law. She co-edited together with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Anne Griffiths Mobile People, Mobile Law. Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; and with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber Changing Properties of Property, Oxford: Berghahn, 2006.

Judith Beyer is a Ph.D. candidate of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. She started specializing on Central Asia during the course of her studies at the University of Tübingen from which she graduated with honours. Together with social anthropology she studied international law and Slavonic studies. Her master’s thesis was on the Rhetoric of Transformation: the Constitutional Reform in Kyrgyzstan. She developed her interests in legal anthropology when starting her Ph.D. After one year of field research in the northern part of the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan she is currently in the process of analysing her fieldwork data and writing up her dissertation on The Politics of Customary Law: Courts of Elders in Kyrgyzstan.

Julia Eckert is head of the research group ‘Law against the State’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. She works on questions of legal anthropology, conflict theory, the anthropology of the state, and social movements. She has conducted research in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and India. She was a researcher at the German Institute for international pedagogical research, Frankfurt am Main, and lecturer at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Free University of Berlin, where she gained a Ph.D. Her publications include: The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics and the Shiv Sena, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003; Anthropologie der Konflikte. Georg Elwerts konflikttheoretische Thesen in der Diskussion, Bielefeld: transcript, 2004; ‘The Trimurti of the state.’ Sociologus II: 181-217, 2005.

Anja Peleikis is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. As a member of the Project Group ‘Legal Pluralism’ she works on questions of memory and heritage politics, the making of place and translocality, tourism and legal pluralism in Lithuania. She gained her Ph.D. degree at the University of Bielefeld, Germany and worked as a researcher at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO), Berlin. Her work on Lebanese translocal migration was published as Lebanese in Motion. Gender and the Making of a Translocal Village, Bielefeld: transcript, 2003. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Lebanon and Lithuania.

Fernanda Pirie is a research fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford where she undertakes research into processes of conflict resolution, issues of order, state-society interactions and the relations between law and religion on the Tibetan plateau. She was, between 2002 and 2005, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Forthcoming books include A Fragile Web, based on fieldwork in Ladakh and Order and Disorder, jointly edited with Keebet von Benda-Beckmann.

Tatjana Thelen joined the Project Group ‘Legal Pluralism’ in 2002 after receiving her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Free University of Berlin. Currently she holds a joint appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale and the Humboldt University Berlin. She teaches courses in Social Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and the Martin Luther University in Halle. Her doctoral research was a comparative study of  (dis-)continuity of norms and practices concerning property relations in rural Hungary and Romania. Among her publications on this issue is the book Privatisierung und soziale Ungleichheit in der osteuropäischen Landwirtschaft. Zwei Fallstudien in Ungarn und Rumänien, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003. Her current research project focuses on changing social security relations in Eastern Germany.

Bertram TURNER is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. 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. He has published in the fields of legal anthropology, conflict settlement, violence and retaliation, and the management of natural resources. His most recent monograph is on asylum and conflict: Asyl und Konflikt, Berlin: Reimer, 2005.