Shivnandini Dube, Sri Sathya Sai College of Law for Women
ABSTRACT
The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect.1 Law is a legal system of the culture which defines languages, religion, music, marriage and so on. Law is the backbone of the society as, if you want to study about the society, you have to firstly study the law of that society. Law is the product of culture. We can observe that there is an interconnection between law and culture because there is the co-existence of each other which completes the basic fundamental needs of the society. It is to be noted that culture not only forms the foundation of laws that governs it but also brings changes over the passage of time in the society. We often speak of law and culture in one breath. That may be so because both systems impose on each person and organization required rules of behaviour. Yet, law and culture are quite different, though they relate to and affect each other. legal rules are enforced by legal rules (e.g., the power of the authorities), while cultural rules are usually enforced by societal pressure. Culture rules and religious rules are backed by the subjects' internalized beliefs.2 Law is culture, not its consequence. This is one of the fundamental premises of the cultural analysis of law. The content of the category ‘culture’, however, is one of the most elusive in the humanities: it is not easy to specify its limits or make explicit its fundamental components. It is not easy to specify either what should be the most fruitful way to approach the academic study of legal culture.
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