Dislocating Custom

Abstract

This article approaches the relationship between the categories of custom and law by means of an experiment with cartographic metaphors of scale and location. In Papua New Guinea, the relationship of custom to law is configured by the canonization of custom (the concept as it is known in studies of legal pluralism) in the Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea and in the Underlying Law Act 2000. However, the status of this universalizing category is complicated by its relationship to the putatively local category of kastom, as it is known throughout Papua New Guinea. I argue that the two categories, custom and kastom, do not share an equivalent relationship to law because they occupy different levels of scale. In the discourses of legal elites, custom encompasses kastom. Whereas for many “smaller‐scale” ethnic and language groups within the country, kastom and law are simply two potential categories of efficacious action, among many others, in highly specific and localized “mixes.” These mixes lose their intelligibility when elites attempt to replicate them at the level of the state.

Paying attention to pigs: negotiating equity and equality in global environmental governance in Suau, Papua New Guinea

“…The heterogeneity of social relations cannot be reduced to commensurable attributes, and thus to equivalence. In Suau, it is difference, rather than similarity, that people seem to emphasize in establishing and maintaining relations (Demian 2015: 104; 2021 b ); indeed, the gifting of pigs is grounded in the irreducibility of differences. The conservation projects’ focus on ‘sameness’ is disputed as local people highlight their specific and complex positionalities, rather than the categories they belong to.…”

It is Christ or Corruption in Papua New Guinea: Bring in the Witness!

“…[…] many of our MPs fall victims of being nicknamed 'Instant ATM' […] Local politics, tribal contentions, Melanesian 'Big-Man' syndrome and other cultural factors play a part in drawing an MP away from his or her mandated national responsibility as a lawmaker and overseer of the executive government and its bureaucracy. (Zurenouc 2014:40) Santos da Costa learnt that the primary political issue for the Unity Team was how to deal seriously and practically with culture and tradition as inextricable parts of every Papua New Guineans lifeworld (see Demian 2015;Schram 2014). For members of the Unity Team, the problem was not necessarily that traditional culture was altogether ungodly and evil, but that the pull of one's place of origin and kinship connections was too strong, too real, and too irresistible to be counteracted by measures such as anti-corruption legislation.…”

The States of Law in Papua New Guinea

“…The aim, in his view, was to prevent 'large-scale' organisation, especially between members of different ethnic groups, from forming at all. I have discussed elsewhere (Demian 2015) the perils of using scale, in its sense as a form of measurement, to describe legal orders, especially in a classically 'plural' legal environment such as that of Papua New Guinea, wherein multiple legal orders and law-like ordering influences are present. The emphasis on pluralism during the time period that has elapsed between Fitzpatrick's work in PNG and my own is significant-there was little acknowledgment in the lead-up to independence that anything like a plural legal order was emerging, except from anthropologists (Lawrence 1969;Strathern 1972).…”