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Eliciting Customary Law

Noel Pearson's notion of the ‘Recognition Space’ between Aboriginal and Euro-Australian law accounts for a region of conjuncture between them. It does not, in anthropological terms, account for the more comprehensive and ongoing elicitation of Aboriginal law and custom by the Australian judicial establishment nor does it allow for the dependence of customary law on the presence of a state culture for such elicitation. Using comparative examples from elsewhere in the world at different historical periods, I argue, as have Béteille (1998) and Filer (this volume), that ‘customary law’ is an artefact of colonial and state regimes of administration of the indigenous and I make some tentative observations on the contrast between legal and anthropological perspectives on such administration as a cultural process.