Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword (original) (raw)

2001, Law & Social Inquiry

The essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen.. .. What I want is to look with all those eyes at once.-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point It is striking quite how quickly the literature on law and colonialism has grown in bandwidth, in thickness, in imaginative reach over the past 15 years; all the more so, since the discipline that might ordinarily have been expected to open up the topic to comparative interrogation, anthropology, was famously slow in paying any real attention to it.' In its first fluorescence, that literature evinced a rather crude topos. Its primary concern was to demonstrate the importance of legalities, broadly defined, in the imposition of control by Europe over its various "others": how law was "the cutting edge of colonialism, an instrument of the power of an alien state and part of the process of coercion" (Chanock 1985,4), how it became a "tool for pacifying and governing. .. colonized peoples" (Stamp 1991, 810). Note the iconography: a cutting edge, an instrument, a tool; all material means of manufacture these, all signs of the mettle of empire. Nor is this iconography a matter of mere scholastic fancy. In nineteenth-century South Africa,