The future of drylands

To the reader unfamiliar with African realities, the approach applied here is very different from the Western context. The African continent cannot be approached without first integrating data derived from cultural, psychological, political and economic dimensions that pervade and condition law, with emphasis on the rights. Moreover, the disconcerting aspect for the non-initiated is to be confronted with a diversity of social groups at the heart of which rights are embedded. This emphasizes an essential aspect to understanding the juridical component: the texts enacted by states do not always correspond (and often in a very small way) to the legal referent of actors. We are challenged by a diversity of particularly disconcerting juridical systems, and juridical anthropology is the only field that enables us not to fall irremediably into the trap of ethnocentrism, which tends to “generalize” and even “universalize” our representation of law. The specific case of land tenure is symptomatic of this: the property right, or rights, essentially defines its status or land tenure system. The diligent lawyer is required to research the issue in order to clarify the object of research: namely, what is the legal qualification of a parcel of land, pasture, forest, etc.? What if the parcel in question is not perceived by its users as property but as an object on which their survival depends — should the lawyer unconditionally qualify the parcel as being part of the system covering property? If institutional economists (see references) are given the possibility to attribute property status systematically to every object, we nonetheless consider that a lawyer does not possess this privilege without providing an attestation of such. The anthropological approach to law introduces a certain complexity to the case, which is often impossible to appreciate from an objective perspective