Fernanda Pirie

Director

 

Contact details
fernanda.pirie@csls.ox.ac.uk
(01865) (2)84229

 

 

Qualifications

DPhil in Social Anthropology (Oxford) 2002
MSc in Social Anthropology (UCL) 1998
Called to the Bar 1988
BA in French and Philosophy (Oxford) 1986

Bibliography

 

Fernanda is an anthropologist, specialising in the study of legal processes in the Tibetan region.

For over a decade Fernanda has carried out fieldwork on the Tibetan plateau, both in Ladakh (in northern India) and among the nomadic people of Amdo (in China’s Qinghai and Gansu provinces). Her studies have centred on conflict resolution, social order, constructions of community and tribe-state relations and have lead to publications on violence, conflict, order and disorder. More recently she has been working on the nature of legalism on the Tibetan plateau and the history and context of Tibetan legal texts, ranging from the law codes of the Empire, through the post-imperial narratives to the codes and private documents of the era of the Dalai Lamas’ government.

Since 2009 Fernanda has been collaborating with colleagues in anthropology and history in a major comparative project on legalism. This brings together scholars from law, history, anthropology, classics and oriental studies in a series of seminars and workshops, in order to compare examples of legal texts and legalistic practices and thought from across the world. It will lead to a series of publications exploring the nature of law and its relations to justice, community, rules and categories.

Current projects include a monograph on the Anthropology of Law (for the Clarendon Law Series of Oxford University Press) and a continuing anthropological study of the English Bar.

 

Core research interests

• Anthropology of law
• Tibetan law and legal practices
• Legalism
• The English Bar

 

Core teaching

• Law in Society (BCL/MJur, MSc/MPhil in anthropology)
• Anthropological methods in socio-legal studies
• Anthropology of Tibet

 

Select publications and conference papers

 

Monograph

2007      Peace and conflict in Ladakh:  the construction of a fragile web of order.     Leiden:  Brill.  http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=19&pid=26020

 

Edited volumes

2008      (with M. van Beek).  Modern Ladakh:  continuity and change in anthropological perspective.  Leiden:  Brill.

2008      (with T. Huber).  Conflict and social order in Tibet and Inner Asia.  Leiden:  Brill.

2007      (with K. von Benda-Beckmann).  Order and disorder:  anthropological perspectives.  Oxford: Berghahn. 

http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=BeckmannOrder

 

 Journal papers and book chapters

2010    Law before Government: Ideology and Aspiration, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 2: 207-228.

2009    From tribal Tibet: the significance of the legal form in M. Freeman (ed.), Law and anthropology. Oxford: University Press.

2009    The horse with two saddles: tamxhwe in modern Golok. Asian Highland Perspectives, vol 1: 164­­-86.

2009    Kings, monks, bureaucrats and the police: Tibetan responses to law and authority in  F. von Benda-Beckmann, K. von Benda-Beckmann and A. Griffiths (eds), The power of law in a transnational world. Oxford: Berghahn.

2008      Violence and opposition among the nomads of Amdo: expectations of leadership and religious authority. In T. Huber and F. Pirie (eds), Conflict, religion and social order in Tibet and Inner Asia. Leiden: Brill.

2008      Dancing in the face of death: Losar celebrations in Photoksar. In M. van Beek and F. Pirie (eds) Ladakhi societies: continuity and change in anthropological perspective. Leiden: Brill.

2007      Order, individualism and responsibility: contrasting dynamics on the Tibetan plateau.’ In K. von Benda-Beckmann and F. Pirie (eds) Order and disorder: anthropological perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn.

2006      Legal autonomy as political engagement: the Ladakhi village in the wider world, Law and Society Review 40 (1), 77-103.

2006      Secular morality, village law and Buddhism in Tibetan societies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(1), 173-190.

2006      Insisting on agreement: Tibetan law and its development in Ladakh. In C. Klieger (ed.) Tibetan Borderlands. Leiden: Brill, 67-87.

2006      Legal complexity on the Tibetan plateau. In F. and K. von Benda-Beckmann (eds), Dynamics of plural legal orders, special issue of the Journal of Legal Pluralism, 53/54, 77-99.

2005      Segmentation within the state: the reconfiguration of Tibetan tribes in China's reform period, Nomadic Peoples 9(1), special issue on Pastoralism in Post-Socialist Asia, C. Kerven and K. Bauer (eds), 83-102.

2005      Tribe and state in Eastern Tibet: feuding, mediation and the negotiation of authority among the Amdo nomads. Working paper no. 72. Halle: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

2005      The impermanence of power: village politics in Ladakh, Nepal and Tibet. In J. Bray (ed.) Ladakhi histories: local and regional perspectives, Leiden: Brill, 379-94.