Colonial Legality in Sumatra

ABSTRACT The literature on the law of the colonial archipelago and the Malay-speaking world more broadly, has recently shown that colonial law was a highly fragile system, that was co-constructed by colonisers and colonised elites, and litigants. It has been convincingly argued that a variety of actors inside and outside colonial courts as well as multiple political discourses, contributed to the making of colonial legality in Java and the Straits Settlements. I propose that a turn to ontology which has recently been espoused by a number of anthropological contributions could help further explore this notion of fragility in the archipelagic world. Such an ‘ontological turn’ would allow us to closely examine the carriers of knowledge themselves, namely colonial archival documentation, and how these contributed to, but hid, the fragile nature of law. Specifically, I analyse written exchanges between Dutch colonial administrators and academics about an adat-based Muslim divorce case from Tapanuli in Sumatra, that documented how law in the Dutch East Indies was constructed through the written form and the creation of epistemic absences in the colonial archive. With ontological intervention, I argue, we can engage more deeply with such power-laden archival documentation, and recognise more thoroughly the multiple factors involved in the construction of colonial law. Moreover, a turn to ontology has the potential to disrupt our own analytical repertoire used to apprehend forms of law and sociality, undermine truth claims of the colonial archive, and produce new concepts to consider.