Principal speaker
Dr Rebecca Monson
Despite the wealth of scholarship on the “archival turn” in other disciplines, legal scholars have had relatively little to say about their approach to archival materials or their conceptualisation of the archive. This presentation explores aspects of my engagement with the records of land commissions and courts in Solomon Islands as part of a wider project examining the role of law in imperial expansion and transformations in land tenure and gender relations. I consider the insights that might be gained from attending not only to the content of the archive nor even to its form, but to both the allure of the archive and the anxiety it induces. In the case of the project discussed here, paying attention to the emotional aspects of archival work cast new light on the ethical dimensions of accessing, using and interpreting court records; and directed attention to the quiet, mundane, epistemic violence of the law which might otherwise go unnoticed.