Traditionalism and Traditional Law

Abstract

John Berger tells the story of the peasant Lucie Cabrol in terms of her “three lives” because she lived and lived on in three different ways. Readers of the story in Lucie Cabrol's village say she now has four lives. The fourth is in her story. My theme to-day is that representations of knowledge give a life to that knowledge. This life shapes the object of the knowledge. That may appear an intensely academic concern and it is. But I will show that it is, in the same moment, an indispensible practical and political concern. I start in good company with that body of revisionist scholarship which shows that traditional law or customary law was a creation of the colonial period. For an initial instance, I will depart once only in this lecture from Africa for Oceania. I use this instance because it is compact, irresistible and needs to be better known to legal science. In colonial Fiji, British officials, for the purpose of what the British called good government, sought “to seize … the spirit in which native institutions have been framed”. In the Native Regulations they erected, as one anthropologist put it, “the first code of Fijian custom set down in writing after discussion by representatives from all parts of the Colony and, generally speaking, the great body of custom that it contains has been understood for generations; and so it was not something new and therefore suspect to the Fijians to whom it was applied”.