Temporalities in property relations under a plural legal order: Minangkabau revisited

Abstract

A temporal perspective is critical for understanding how communities handle changes and continuities in property relations under conditions of legal pluralism. It provides crucial clues on property relations upon the death of property holders and on how concretized property relationships are maintained in social relationships between concrete property holders and objects. This paper inquires into entanglements of distinct property regimes valid among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, where three legal orders coexist: adat law, Islamic law and state law. Substantial differences in how temporalities are inscribed into the categorical property relations under each of these legal orders have rendered the property and inheritance regimes distinct and the temporalities embodied in each of the component laws discordant.How the temporal logics are configured in each legal order has important consequences for the choices people make when deciding about inheritance and land registration or when handling land disputes -all issues of vital personal, social and economic importance. The temporal focus reveals the reasons for the strong resistance to property categories under state law and Islamic inheritance law. Changes and continuities in property relations in any society are to an important extent informed by the temporalities inscribed in property categories, and some of the most renitent problems of plural legal orders result from the discordant temporalities embodied in each of the component laws. Translating or introducing property concepts in a plural legal order without considering the implications for the legal framework as a whole, and without paying attention to the time dimensions involved, leads to misunderstandings, and uncertainty, instead of trust.

Local Language as Representation of Local Wisdom in the West Sumatra Regional Regulation

“…Pusako is divided into two, namely pusako randah and pusako tinggi. Pusako randah 'low pusako property' referred to harato pancaharian or result of own effort designating inherited property that had become pusako only one or two generations ago to be distinguished from the pusako tinggi 'high pusako property' that had the status of pusako for a longer period (Von Benda-Beckmann & Von Benda-Beckmann, 2014).…”

SPECIAL TREATMENT JOURNAL, 2024. Vol. 10.(SI)

“…All of these will be harvested together within a certain time. Luang community is prohi-bited from taking the natural resources withdrawn in the hygeralai until the specified time limit (Benda-Beckmann von et al, 1992;Binter, 2015).…”

Durable Resolutions

“…While scholars have highlighted the close relationship between law, spatialization, and temporalization (Braverman et al 2014), legal pluralism has received limited attention in this context (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2014a). Foregrounding the role of justice processes in the mediation of geographically dispersed communities, this article shows how, in the legal plurality that exists among exiled South Sudanese, different institutions not only relate differently to national borders (von Benda-Beckmann et al 2009), but also encode different temporal perspectives and expectations (Griffiths 2014;von Benda-Beckmann 2014;von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2014b). As opposed to individualized state justice, which is limited by national borders and conceivably blind to the communal roots of disputes, community justice reaches into past events and relationships, regardless of where these took place or evolved, and is also understood as being able to generate resolutions that promise to promote social cohesion and communal harmony, regardless of where those involved in any particular dispute may find themselves in the future.…”