Abstract

This paper seeks to provide a reconstruction of the events that, within the field of legal science, have led to the recent emergence of legal anthropology as a subject of interest to jurists, albeit in dialogue with anthropologists. In this context, it is possible to conclude that contemporary legal anthropology is no longer confined to the description of isolated practices that are perceived as alien to the European perspective. Instead, it is oriented towards the development of a comprehensive historical analysis of law, with the objective of establishing a new theoretical framework for the discipline that is capable of integrating the insights that had been excluded by the positivistic approach. In this sense, legal anthropology aims to identify some stable universal rules that can be applied across diverse human cultures, despite the inherent instability of these cultures.