ABSTRACT
In its founding decades, the anthropology of law, largely centered in Britain, paid little explicit attention to culture, although it often did so implicitly by addressing vernacular ideas and beliefs involved in legal processes. Explicit focus on the cultural foundations of law came, in the USA, with a turn to cultural hermeneutics and the ‘legal sensibilities’ involved in the management of conflict; that turn resonated with a shift, in the broader field of Law and Society, from the study of law and culture to the study of law as culture. Most recently, the anthropology of law-as-culture has expanded to take in new foci. These include the role of language and linguistic ideologies in legal processes and the devolution of culture across much of the world into intellectual property. This entry traces the broad trajectory from the early generations of the anthropology of law to its major contemporary concerns.