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UNDERSTANDING LAW IN MICRONESIA: An Interpretive Approach to Transplanted Law. By Brian Z. Tamanaha. Leiden (The Netherlands): E. J. Brill (Studies in Human Society, Volume 7). 1993. viii, 214 pp. US$45.75, Paper ISBN 90-04-09768-6.
OVER THE PAST SIXTY YEARS, anthropology's contribution to a more circumspect understanding of the nature of law and legal change in Pacific Island societies and cultures has been considerable. Always controversial, and struggling now more so than ever before to reconcile, if not to resolve, the tensions generated by seemingly intractable problems of epistemology, ideology and indeterminacy, that decidedly anthropological contribution has come increasingly to inform a small but significant body of complementary legal scholarship.
Less well appreciated -- in part, perhaps, because it was once so closely associated with the ill-conceived Law and Development Movement of the 1960s, and in part because it has always been regarded as an arcane and marginal feature within the larger fields of conventional jurisprudence and comparative law -- the reciprocal contribution of a self-consciously critical cadre of legal scholars sheds an equally instructive light on ethnographic studies and anthropological analyses of those same issues. This book is exemplary of that...