ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Legal Surveying Movement: Capturing Indigenous Law in German Pacific Imperialism

• In Event: Pluralism and the Human Sciences in Imperial and Postcolonial Contexts

English Abstract

Decades before legal anthropology took a more recognizable shape in the 1920s, a wave of written documentation of legal institutions occurred. Legal professionals—many of them embedded in the administration of German colonies—extracted common law in the form of rules and proverbs. They took recourse to the interventionist political tool of the enquete and devised circulating questionnaires. This paper focuses on the Pacific legal orders. Based on new findings from Samoan archives, it examines the extent to which the legal surveying movement aligned with the objectives of a new program of liberal colonial governance. In many regions the colonial administration depended on Indigenous law, because a questionable form of legal pluralism had become the norm.
To put law on paper, however, had one unintended side-effect. It conferred unprecedented authority on these rules. From a Pacific perspective, writing on these matters constituted an act of codification. Back in Europe the danger inherent in these state-financed surveying projects was clearly recognized, feared, and thwarted by various means with some success. It was not until well after the loss of all German colonies that scholars of Indigenous law began to act upon the archive they had built. They came to understand the wealth of socio-ecological institutions negotiated under divergent cosmovisions. Internationalist circles began to advocate for the rights of First Nations and the abolition of colonial rule.

Author

• Anna Echterhölter, University of Vienna