Overlapping jural publics: A model for dealing with the 'society' question in native title

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to solve a problem that confronts anthropologists in their applied work in native title — how to respond to that part of legal doctrine which requires proof of a continuing normative system and society. The present paper needs to be distinguished from my doctoral research, which took a sociological view of the interaction of the social fields of law and anthropology in native title, in particular the nature of anthropological and judicial agency.1 In that research I was able to stand outside the case studies I had chosen to examine. But having subsequently returned to native title work as an anthropologist, the question of how to respond to the ambiguities of native title legal doctrine took on a more immediate and practical intensity. Show more