Legal Adaptation in a Papua New Guinea Village Court

Abstract

As the title of Starr and Collier's (1989) recent volume, History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology suggests, anthropologists are becoming increasingly concerned with asymmetrical power relations and historical time in the comparative study of law. As anthropology concerns itself more with the politics of domination and resistance, law is more frequently seen as a vehicle for encoding and perpetuating power relationships. No longer is local-level conflict management examined without reference to the broader social milieu of which it is part. In situations of pluralism, the relationship between the local community and the state is of more central importance, and must be examined in the colonial and postcolonial context in which it developed. Papua New Guinea is a particularly interesting location for the investigation of pluralism not only because of the diversity of its traditional cultures, but also because of its relatively recent history of contact and political independence. Historical process can be more easily examined if only because there are fewer historical documents to be found and, in many locations, colonial history does not extend beyond the memory of living individuals. Thus, time depth is shallow. Furthermore, Papua New Guinea has made a conscious effort to integrate its many customary systems with its national law through the development of a system of Village Courts, designed to operate by employing local customs. In examining the articulation among national and local systems in Papua New Guinea, scholars have been informed by the new directions in the comparative study of law described above, and recent research has focused on the nature of development. Two basic approaches have emerged. One, heavily influenced by dependency theory, takes what Galanter (1981:1) has called a legal centralism perspective, also called the command model of law (cf. Kidder 1979). Law is regarded as an instrument of domination of an essentially powerless peasantry by a ruling class (see, e.g., Fitzpatrick 1980). Thus Paliwala (1982:191), in an analysis of Papua New Guinea's Village Courts, sees these local-level courts as bringing about, ...greater involvement and control by the state and a degree of authoritarianism on the part of court officials. result is relatively alienated dispute settlement with little scope for community involvement and party concensus. In another study, lamo (1987) argues that among the hierarchically-organized, Austronesian-speaking Keakalo people, Village Court Magistrates choose to impose judgments rather than use mediation techniques, and the Court serves the interests of the elite. He (lamo 1987:115) concludes that, The Village Court system, originally planned to integrate a rich body of customary mediation and negotiation techniques, has in fact enhanced a

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