UC Irvine

This chapter reflects on the implications for the anthropology of law. As anthropologists turn to transnational and international legal processes, the question of the ‘social’ takes on a particular salience and has the potential to create productive theoretical muddles. The chapter serves as a demonstration of Thrift’s statement, and points toward a less linear, less causal account of the role of the ‘social’ in transnational, multilateral governance today. It proceeds by reviewing the notion of soft law and its incorporation/creation of a category of the social. It then analyses the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) effort to curb harmful tax practices as an initiative designed to incorporate ‘society’ into governance. It concludes by reflecting on the observation among legal anthropologists and law and society scholars that international legal processes resemble and contingently re-assemble something called ‘society’ in the process of trying to take society into account.