As we have noted, research on legal pluralism does not necessarily adopt a state-centric approach.
Rather than focusing on the ways in which state law accepts or rejects non-state legal orders, some pluralism scholars use their powers of observation, description, and analysis to identify the systems of law (broadly defined) that they actually can see operating within a particular social space, and they describe how people invoke, ignore, reject, or manipulate them.
In such accounts, state law may or may not have a prominent position, depending on the research findings in each instance. Moreover, even when state law is conspicuous, its observable operations - the law in action - may differ greatly from its idealized depictions - the law on the books. Thus, studies of legal pluralism “from the ground up” offer certain advantages over state-centric approaches, since they give greater prominence to the multiple normative systems people actually experience, and they allow us to see more accurately how state law operates in complex, multilayered social environments.2.5