Whose Heritage? Legal Pluralism and the Politics of the Past. A Case Study from the Curonian Spit (Lithuania)

Since the term ‘legal pluralism ’ was introduced more than thirty years ago it has become the subject of a “long intellectual odyssey ” (Merry 1988: 869) and “of emotionally-loaded debates ” concerning the meaning and scope of the term (F. von Benda-Beckmann 2002: 37).1 However, as the Benda-Beckmanns have convincingly shown in their work, the importance of ‘legal pluralism ’ lies less in the ideological debates on the term itself, but rather in insights from empirical research (K. von Benda-Beckmann 2001, F. von Benda-Beckmann 2002). Fieldwork on legal pluralism was initially concerned with the intersection of so-called indigenous law and European or Western-style law in colonial and post-colonial societies. Later, legal anthropological research was no longer confined to former colonial states, but was also carried out in industrialised countries (Greenhouse and Strijbosch 1993). Recently, research on law and legal pluralism has expanded further into transnational and international law under conditions of globalisation (see for example F. von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2005).