Summary
Law and Empire in the Pacific:
Intersections of Culture and Legality
An interdisciplinary group of scholars
met for "Law and Empire in the Pacific: Private Intersections
of Culture and Legality," an advanced seminar that considered
the legacies of colonial and postcolonial legal arrangements in
Hawai'i and Fiji. These legacies and their relationships to the
current state of crisis in Hawai'i and Fiji were also examined.
The diversity of the participants resulted in "exciting and
wonderful conversations, as well as interesting analytical dilemmas," reported
Sally Engle Merry, who served as seminar co-chair with Donald Brenneis.
"Our goal was to understand today's crises—such
as political instability, ethnic tension, and resistance to indigenous land claims—in
terms of the histories and legacies of law in the past as it is being created
and recreated in the present," said Brenneis. "Our discussions focused
on variations in land ownership, kinship systems, political organization, historical
events, conceptions of culture and race, and British and American colonial strategies.
Law was a central but not exclusive concern."
The seminar explored these intersections in a historical
and contemporary context through detailed comparisons of Hawai'i and Fiji: two
societies that share many features of social composition and historical experience
yet differ in their form of legal colonization. The United States colonized Hawai'i;
England colonized Fiji. Both Fiji and Hawai'i, Pacific societies with long traditions
of chiefdom, became sugar plantation societies in the nineteenth century. Indigenous
populations were forced to share space and resources with a small colonizing
elite of predominantly European background amid growing ranks of workers imported
from economically depressed regions. In both situations, colonial authorities
constructed vastly different relationships with the indigenous peoples than they
did with the imported workers.
A central theme that emerged was the intimate relationship
between law and the production of social knowledge, as well as a sense of the
possibility that such knowledge affords. The seminar discussions "re-centered
law in social theory," said Merry. "By examining the complex and contradictory
changes of colonialism and postcolonialism through the lens of legal arrangements,
this conference recuperated law as a core concern of the anthropological understanding
of the production of social life."
