This polyglot land ownership has a particular impact on how not only the landscape, but also the legal landscape of a city like Lae are managed. Like the harassment-based legislation that Valverde used to show how cities in North America and Europe use very intimate patterns of social relations to enact ordinances that would never be accepted if they were simply imposed at the state level, different types of landowners in these Melanesian cities produce different forms of social organization. to deal with the inevitable problems that arise during life in the city. Thank you for your helpful information someone recommended a job opportunity in New Papua Guinea I would be happy if you could introduce me to someone who can give me more information about life there and keep in touch with me. The best respect Fitzpatrick anticipated this in his review of the work of legal anthropologists in the 1970s, that he used, to counteract the « demiurgic scientism » of attempts to systematize the legal sensitivities of colonized societies. More importantly, he saw that if the intellectual apparatus of bourgeois legality were removed from the picture, the way conflicts are handled in Papua New Guinea could unfold outside the realm of a formal legal system. Thus, if « conflict (perceived as a separate or reified process) should not be conducted in the context of other social forms, but that it is about these other social forms » (Fitzpatrick 1985, p. 1985). 476), and Papua New Guinea`s legal subjects emerged in the dynamics of debate in a multitude of social spheres, not only in those of legal bodies.
For forty-five years after independence, the state has served symbolic rather than functional purposes, the perceived sources of law in Papua New Guinea are multiple: in the experimental communal morality of cities, in Christianity, in colonial history, in the 50,000 years of unwritten history of New Guinea before colonialism. Some of these legal sensitivities serve the ongoing processes of class building and a world of treaty-based relationships. Others, however, serve up previous stories of Papua New Guinea living in self-regulating legal landscapes across the country that are not recognized by either the state or elite formations. In an earlier project based on Papua New Guinea`s capital, Port Moresby, I investigated how this sensitivity is due, among other things, to the segregationist urban legal landscape of the former colonies that make up today`s independent state. This process of segregation was exactly what Fitzpatrick documented during his time in Papua New Guinea. He and other observers of the time (Oram 1976; Levine and Levine, 1979) noted that the housing laws enacted by the Australian Government were intended to ensure that no Papua New Guinean actually settled permanently in cities, primarily by providing housing for families, but only for single men who were destined to be temporary migrants and would then return to their villages after a certain period of wage labour. When I follow the legal news of the different jurisdictions I cover, it is particularly interesting to see the main local problems of a country and the attempts to solve them through laws and other mechanisms. Often, these problems and solutions are closely linked to a country`s history, geography and culture. One of those issues I`ve read about is the killing of people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) because they are suspected of practicing witchcraft.
The Law Library`s collection contains a number of books related to the laws of Papua New Guinea, including reports from the Constitutional and Legal Reform Commission, books on the legal system, and copies of old colonial laws that applied before independence. The laws « look good on paper, » says Evelyn Wohuinangu, chief counsel at PNG`s Center for Environmental and Community Rights Law (CELCOR), an NGO. The list of statutes represents « beautiful legislation, » agrees Peter Dam of FORCERT, an NGO that works with forest communities. What should a young jurist think of such a political environment, especially one that contained a comprehensive set of Marxist techniques for analyzing processes of class formation? In Law and State in Papua New Guinea (1980), Fitzpatrick offered an anthropologically informed Marxist critique of the development of a legal system in a recently decolonized Pacific country. Fitzpatrick drew on the growing literature in dependency theory and world systems theory, as well as his own experiences in PNG, to examine the impact of what he called « bourgeois legality » on the country. Fitzpatrick used an analysis of specific groups of actors in the formation of Papua New Guinea as a jurisdiction to show the extent to which all legislation enacted before and immediately after independence was intended to support the interests of Papua New Guinea`s colonial order or emerging elites. « What is needed in style, » he proposed in an earlier work, « is a true popular law, radically different from the turgid legal formulation of present law; Laws are invariably drafted on the premise that they are enforced only by lawyers and public servants » (Fitzpatrick, 1975, p. 284).
At this point, I would like to use the concept of urban perspective in Mariana Valverde`s legislation (2011) and Doreen Massey`s (2005) use of the urban as examples of an intensification of sociality and distinction through spatial ideas. I argue that no matter how hard you try to enforce certain boundaries through spatial distinctions such as urban and rural, there will always be leaks, overflows, and excesses – because the village suggests the city as much as the metropolis dictates the boundaries of the village. Even the distinction itself is not stable, as Papua New Guinea`s legal landscapes show. What would such a « true people`s law » look like for Papua New Guinea? This article, which draws on twenty years of research on Papua New Guinea`s legal landscape, is an attempt to complement the meditation Fitzpatrick began during his stay in the country during its transition to independence. I would like to take his question seriously and ask him how it is possible to have a popular law that does not apply only to the post-colony middle class (Gewertz and Errington 1999; Cox 2018), or for the latest iterations of a culture-specific leader, the classic figure of the « great man » in Papua New Guinea. I maintain that a people`s law has emerged and continues to emerge in the ongoing process of Papula New Guinea`s formation as a jurisdiction containing multiple jurisdictions and quasi-judicial space, and as a legal landscape which, according to Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos` (2015) concept of the legal landscape, is « the way in which the tautology between law and space unfolds as a difference » (p. 66). The nature of the space imbued with law, in turn, creates a proliferation of more space and more law that branches out into the future – and crucial for Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, this can happen regardless of whether the space in question is urban or rural in nature, thus eliminating the distinction between them.
I will come back to this topic later in the article. But my main assertion is that all this has happened outside the political proposals of government bodies and NGOs and is only indirectly manifested in Parliament`s actions. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2015. Spatial Justice: Body, Legal Landscape, Atmosphere. London: Routledge. Although onerous laws such as prohibition and resistance to betel nuts are usually associated with « pre-modern » forms of government, Valverde reminds us that « the persistence of the logic of harassment . is best seen neither as a resistance nor as a survival of old customs. On the contrary, the management of urban disorder through embodied, experiential and relational categories is a necessary component of contemporary urban governance » (Valverde 2011, p.
280, emphasis added). In Papua New Guinea, the rural exodus should not even govern the laws of colonial rule and has been characterized almost since its emergence as an antithesis of village life. The villages were presented as a Papua New Guinean social order with an emphasis on order: culturally and linguistically homogeneous, respected by all intergenerational and gender relations, and governed by a quasi-legal regime called « custom » in the country`s constitution and by many ordinary Papua New Guineans. Thus, the disordered city, presented as a modernist antithesis to the pastoral of PNG, has become a space of frightening governmentality. The question then becomes: what is the point of people often having these two roles at the same time? The various possible answers to this question also serve as an answer to Fitzpatrick`s concern about how ordinary Papua New Guineans would find something like a voice of their own in a legal system designed first for white colonizers and later for the Papua New Guinean elites who became the country`s new bourgeoisie. These possible answers also raise interesting questions about the legal landscape of Papua New Guinea`s urban areas and what « jurisdiction » actually means in urban and rural areas of the country. The government asked the Constitutional and Legislative Reform Commission to review the magic laws in 2009. The commission last reviewed the laws in the late 1970s, but made no recommendation for change until the project was completed. The purpose of the new review is « to assess and determine the effectiveness of this Act with respect to existing offences and penalties, as well as the defences and mitigating circumstances available under the Magic Statutes, and to identify enforcement issues. » Of course, torture and/or murder of a person labeled a witch is likely to constitute a criminal offence under the 1974 Penal Code, but it appears that – for various reasons – charges and murders were difficult to prevent and punish under existing laws.
