ABSTRACT

This contribution endeavours to push the proposed methodology of the present volume to something of an extreme. If the remit of this collection has been to suggest the ways in which a methodological attentiveness to ‘things’ can expose the outlines of disparate ontologies – formulations of the nature of reality where presumed divisions between subjects and objects, persons and things emerge from ethnography rather than precede ethnographic description – then the object of this chapter’s attentions seems counter-intuitive. Law, and here very specifically the received law of the Kingdom of Swaziland (which is to say the rule of law system inherited from the country’s colonial era), is often imagined as the most heady of abstractions, a monolith of analogies and formalism which the legal realists ridiculed as ‘transcendental nonsense’ (Cohen 1935; 1960, passim). Even where legal theorists advocated a return to empirical studies of law, verifiable concepts, and (legal) knowledge as experience linked to problem-solving (all hallmarks of the realist schools of jurisprudence), law itself was never couched in terms of a ‘thing’. Indeed, where law equated quite strictly to the aggregate of rules which comprised a given legal system, the rules had to be administered and interpreted in order to earn the title of law; ‘paper’ rules remain ephemeral and count as law only once meaning is added through judicial interpretation. And the counterparts of these ‘rule-sceptics’ were the ‘fact-sceptics’, whose concern for the inherent uncertainty in law turned on the multiple meanings and interpretations which could attach to legal facts – a position which only further separated the immaterial character of law from the observable behaviours which animated it. In short, ‘realism’ in jurisprudence conferred no greater substantiality to an entity known as ‘law’, it merely re-focused attention onto those social interactions which concretised legal abstraction. And in such formulations, one can see the very meaning/ thing divide which this volume has sought to reject.