Relative,Relational,and Affective: Rethinking Legal Consciousness Under Legal Pluralism

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and digital materials, this paper examines how legal consciousness is constructed and operated across coexisting legal systems. The data show that legal consciousness is not confined to a single dominant order but is shaped through processes of comparison, negotiation, and contrast among multiple legal orders, and that participants’ legal consciousness is plural and relative. Legal consciousness also emerges as relational—formed not only through individuals’ social relationships, but also through how they relate themselves and their communities to multiple legal systems. While existing scholarship shows that emotions influence legal consciousness, this study suggests that relational dynamics play a central role in mediating that process. Feelings about law are closely tied to how individuals understand their relationship to it—whether one of colonial domination, communal belonging, or religious duty. The article introduces three categories of legal consciousness—Outside-the-Law, Enmeshed with the Law, and Leveraging the Law—each capturing distinct ways participants give meaning to coexisting legal orders. These categories move beyond approaches centered on a single order and illuminate how legal consciousness is shaped in relation to multiple systems and through transnational awareness. Together, they offer new theoretical and empirical contributions and reveal how marginalized actors sustain complex, strategic, and emotionally grounded relationships to law across national and normative boundaries.