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7 Law as Object
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From its inception at the hands of Fiji’s retreating colonial government , Fiji’s postcolonial era has been an era of groups. The first independence constitution gives political valence to a notion of racial groups by dividing voters into Fijians, Indians, and “General Voters,” paving the way for both group-based politics and alliances across groups (Lal 1986). Since then, individual affiliation to these groups has been a crucial official and unofficial basis of legal entitlements. As the chapters in this volume collectively demonstrate, this notion of the group has its antecedents in concepts that defined the nineteenthcentury colonial period, such as race, custom, and labor (compare Thomas 1991; Kaplan 1995; Kaplan 1998). It also has parallels in midcentury anthropology: The group-ness of Fiji as anthropological object has been perpetuated implicitly in ethnographic studies that largely take these groups as independent subjects of study. At the same time, recent work has taken as its point of departure the fact that this reified group-ness, in the hands of others, has come back to haunt us. At the moment of the failure of the group as an analytical category for anthropologists , the group enjoys a revival outside the academy such that 187 7 Law as Object Annelise Riles 187 anthropologists can now take a certain macabre fascination with others ’ ways of “doing what we used to do” (Miyazaki 2000b, following Strathern). At the School of American Research advanced seminar, there was considerable discussion of current “crisis” in the Pacific. The crisis is familiar to anthropologists for other reasons as well. The failure of the group as an analytical tool is, for anthropologists also, one of an excess of knowledge, or signification, albeit of a slightly different kind—an exhaustion with denomination and identification, with endless questions of who belongs where, why, and for what purposes. The objectifications are not “theirs” alone, in other words. They are also ours, as evidenced by the charges and countercharges of essentialism within the discipline in the 1990s. The crisis to which this volume refers is as much a crisis of knowledge for anthropology as a crisis in the world. Indeed, that we experience analytical anxiety as a matter of a crisis “out there” is a paradigmatic example of how, as Roy Wagner (1981) described a quarter-century ago, anthropologists make their knowledge external to themselves, of how we make objects. In our collective understanding, “their” crises coincide with, cause, and are caused by “ours.” Each is an instantiation of the other for us. I invoke Wagner’s work on objectification here because his arguments have powerfully influenced a body of literature that defined the moment preceding the theoretical present of this volume (and which this volume both extends and innovates upon), known as the turn to the “invention of tradition” (Thomas 1997:186). One of the principal interests of this literature concerned the nature of objectification— how the colonizer made the colonized into an “object” of knowledge and the dialogics of objectifications on the part of both colonizer and colonized that followed (Cohn 1987; Thomas 1997). As Miyazaki (2000b) has argued, this literature worked an implicit parallel between the objectifications of what it took as an outdated anthropology and the objectifications of the colonizer and colonized. The solutions to the theoretical problems this literature posed, as well as its understanding of colonial realities, instead emphasized anti-essentialism, the complexity of phenomena and their meanings, the proliferation of symbols instead of their constriction—in short, more signification, not less. Anthropologists responded to a crisis of excess by suggesting further Annelise Riles 188 [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:50 GMT) levels, dimensions, and possibilities—by adding more rather than taking away. If the discovery of crisis is an example of anthropologists’ practices of object making, we have sought a solution to this crisis in our powerful critiques of objectification—until now. Recently, a new solution seems to have emerged to the crises we experience in our work and in the world. In the vocabulary of the invention of tradition literature, I want to suggest in this chapter that anthropologists have “objectified” law—we have imagined a phenomenon known as law as an essential object of contemplation, critique, or knowledge. This objectification is, at least at a theoretical level, curious, given the past decade’s recurrent critiques of essentialism, attention to the...