After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

Abstract

The majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization declares its ruling to be an optimum result of separating law from politics. "After Dobbs" examines that claim's provocations for anthropologists interested in the ethnography of politics and law. I begin with the court's paradoxical rendering of United States democracy-an algorithm of electoral power that is eliciting unanticipated forms of agency extending well beyond partisan party politics. As such, those new forms are especially instructive, and in their pursuit, I consider them in a broader context. The next part of the discussion turns to recent work by ethnographers in situations in which people identify their own experience as political in new ways or for the first time. Finally, reflecting on that body of ethnographic work in relation to Dobbs and its after-effects, I identify through-lines connecting law(s) and politics in practice (as well as in ethnographic practice): indeterminacies of scale, the dynamic instability of juridification and the creative openness of political agency. These points also serve as prompts to rethink the conditions of law's availability to ethnography.