Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities

Comparative law and legal anthropology have traditionally restricted themselves to their own fields of inquiry. Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities turns this tendency on its head and investigates what happens when the voices of each discipline are invited to speak to each other. Susan Drummond forges this hybrid form of comparative work through small- and large-scale studies of Gitano marriage law as it emerges in a Western European state, in a modern urban centre, and in particular communities and families, respectively. Drummond's mapping of Gitano marriage law is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in Andalucia in the mid-1990s. It begins from a traditional legal comparative focus on the emergence of Spanish state family law, considering these developments in a predominantly national and international context. Drummond then adopts a more anthropological focus on one legal culture within (and also beyond) the Spanish state: that of the Gitanos and the transnational Roma. law into play with each other and contemplates how all of these influences bear on the spirit of Andalucian Gitano marriage law. What emerges from the work as a whole is an ethos of marriage law in a thoroughly mixed legal jurisdiction. Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities will appeal to scholars and students in comparative law and legal anthropology, as well as readers interested in Roma studies in general, and the Gitanos in particular.