Infinity within the Brackets

Abstract

The ethnographic subjects of this article are UN‐sponsored international conferences and their legal documents. Drawing upon fieldwork among Fiji delegates at these conferences, in this article I demonstrate the centrality of matters of form, as distinct from questions of “meaning,” in the negotiation of international agreements. A parallel usage of documents and of mats among Fijian negotiators provides a heuristic device for exploring questions of pattern and scale in the aesthetics of negotiation , [documents, institutions, knowledge, aesthetics, law, transnationalism]