ABSTRACT
Chapter three “Legalizing the Spectacle” considers the performance of property on a stage of eruption in which land is conflicted between public and private understandings of ownership and access. The spectacle of volcanic activity is rich with science, art, culture, and social aspects. The flow of land and sea, the migration of people, the building of roads, and even the hardening of molten lava generate innovative jurisprudential questions focused around temporality, spatiality, and movement. As lava flows and geothermal water bubbles, nature assumes a kinetic presence. National parks seek to harness this movement through jurisdictional frameworks. However, nature is not bound to either observe or obey manmade boundaries and often transverses, some might say transgresses, these constructed borders are often perpetuated through private claims of territory and purchase. This chapter examines the public quality of the spectacle as possible disaster, but also as possible hybridized site of law, entrepreneurial culture, and local tourism at official lava-viewing areas set up by Hawai'i County Civil Defense Agency at areas outside the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park.
