Literature and anthropology as critical paradigms of law

Abstract

Critical thinking of Law and its paradigms are, in fact, very old in our society. In the past, philosophy was the main paradigm but, since the advent of modernity and philosophical positivism, science came to occupy this place. In this paper, the author explains how anthropology may be as a critical paradigm of Law, from the decentering of the Western view on the institutions and consequent denaturalization of the idea of the universality of Law. To do so, some texts written by the contemporary anthropologist Robert Vachon were analyzed. In the second part of this paper, the author demonstrates that anthropology finds limitations to this critic, due to the fact that it is culturally linked to social modernity, so that in a critic that seeks to decentralize categories by an absolutely way, it incurs in which Habermas defined as performative contradiction. The author proposed literature as a critical paradigm of Law, because that does not suffer from the enunciative limits in Anthropology, what allows a deeper and consequent criticism.