Legal Pluralism and Persons. Analysing the Concept from Overlapping Discourses in Cultural Turbulent Societies

LELL, HELGA MARÍA

Cluj-Napoca

Conferencia; 7th International Conference on Multicultural Discourses. ?Multicultural Discourses in a Turbulent World?; 2020

Departamento de Inglés de la Facultad de Letras de la Universidad de Babeş-Bolyai, Rumania y la Escuela de Estudios de Comunicación China de la Universidad Hangzhou Normal, China

Providing a definition of legal pluralism as of one of the manifestations of multiculturalism in nowadays societies is a hard task since it involves also defining what is and what is not law, in first place, and how different dimensions of social discourses interact in order to produce obligations, rights and permissions that, in many cases overlap in contradictory ways, in second place. This paper aims to review the concept of legal pluralism in order to present different cases of legal pluralism departing from a conception of plurality as interdiscursivity, as different world symbolisms. According to this notions, plurality would come from different kinds of institutionalization of what is or not allowed, mandatory or forbidden. Political theory usually presents two kinds of legal pluralism (one that comes from post-colonial societies and one that does not have to do with colonialism). Here I will argue that there are new phenomena that challenge the concept, for example, because of the overlapping of religious beliefs and institutions that follow a person but are not the official ones in a State (for example, see ?Akhter vs. Khan?, High Court of England and Wales, 31st July 2018), or that emerge from the closeness of certain informal institutions to persons while the official ones seem to be absent (for example, the favela?s or villa?s rules against State?s rules in poverty contexts).