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9 Delegating Closure
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Bernard Cohn and others have drawn attention to the effects of colonial documentation projects such as the collecting of census data (Cohn 1987), the codification of customary law (Moore 1992), the registration of native land titles (France 1969; Rappaport 1994), the surveillance of religious movements (Kaplan 1995), and the recording of ethnological information more generally (Dirks 2001; Thomas 1992). Many of these studies have focused on how documentation projects objectified aspects of colonized societies and, in the process, profoundly shaped colonized populations’ modalities of knowing and modes of resistance (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Merry 2000). In this sense, these studies reflect a larger emphasis in the anthropology of colonialism on the unintended epistemological and ontological consequences of colonization (compare Foucault 1991b). The emphasis on unintended consequences and effects reflects a broader assumption in contemporary social theory about the profoundly indeterminate nature of reality. This assumption, in turn, renders indeterminacy as the condition for acting and knowing. From this perspective, for example, Sally Falk Moore (1978:50) has drawn 239 9 Delegating Closure Hirokazu Miyazaki 239 attention to the way actors “use whatever areas there are of inconsistency , contradiction, conflict, ambiguity, or open areas that are normatively indeterminate to achieve immediate situational ends.” Of course, the nature of indeterminacy at stake in these analyses varies widely, from an indeterminacy of cause and effect (Hayek 1980 [1948]) to an indeterminacy of rules (Bourdieu 1977; Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Moore 1978; Wittgenstein 1953) and of meaning (Geertz 1973). Yet, as the philosopher of social science James Bohman (1991:6) has suggested , there is broad consensus among social scientists that a commitment to indeterminacy should replace a commitment to determinacy as the common goal of the social sciences: “The social sciences are indeed ‘sciences of indeterminacy’ whose theories do not succeed by predicting unique and determinate outcomes.” This chapter suggests that, from actors’ point of view, indeterminacy is not always a given condition and that indeterminacy, as well as determinacy, may be a product of carefully orchestrated strategies.1 I focus on the strategies deployed by Fijians to invoke indeterminacy in their efforts to define their knowledge about their origin place (that is, where they came from) and therefore, metonymically speaking, their knowledge about who they are. I argue that Fijians’ efforts to produce a condition of indeterminacy surrounding their knowledge derive from a specific regime of truth surrounding Fijian land. Early in the twentieth century, the government collected each Fijian social unit’s migration narrative through the sworn testimony of elders. These narratives were declared final evidence of landownership and were closed to future revision. The government since has maintained this regime of truth by rendering these records as sacred documents and strictly controlling access to them. In this regime of truth, the production of the indeterminacy that enables postcolonial actors to redefine who they are on the basis of their present knowledge is experienced as an achievement. In this chapter, I examine various strategies Fijians have deployed to create moments of indeterminacy out of this condition of extreme determinacy. My focus is on a series of petitions Fijians from the village of Suvavou wrote to the government during a period of approximately one hundred years, from 1898 to 1995, requesting that inquiries into the legal basis of the confiscation of their land be reopened. The Hirokazu Miyazaki 240 [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:16 GMT) authenticity of the underlying claims is not my concern. Rather, following Natalie Zemon Davis’s analysis of letters of remission in sixteenthcentury France, I seek to situate these petitions in a wider regime of document production. The petitions are quintessentially heterogeneous documents (compare Hanks 2000:13) that draw on diverse genres of knowledge practices, including bureaucratic, academic, and ritual practices. In many cases, the documents are also products of collaboration between the petitioners and their scribes, “researchers,” “consultants ,” and lawyers (compare Davis 1987:5). Therefore, they cannot be reductively analyzed in terms of either their cultural specificity or their adherence to the technicalities of bureaucratic form. Nevertheless, the documents deploy a variety of strategies deriving from, and in dialogue with, a genre of official documents produced by government officials to record Fijian social systems and migration narratives. As mentioned earlier, these official documents, generated in the course of the colonial administration’s evidence-taking from Fijian witnesses in the early twentieth century, have long been declared uncontestable. In...