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Oral Presentation Session - Cosponsored Status Awarded
Sponsored by: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Cosponsored by: Society for Economic Anthropology
Primary Theme: Identity and Equity
Secondary Theme: Ethics
The English legal historian Frederic Maitland argued (around 1900) that the trust was one of the great innovations of his country’s legal development: a flexible legal mechanism that protected property, fostered common purposes, and even served as a tool of collective resistance, resilience, and adaptation under the narrow conditions of feudal property law. Most importantly, the trust provided families, religious groups, associations, and communities of all kinds with a way of managing their worldly affairs without producing a corporate body with a fictive identity (a “personhood”) against which the “dead hand” of the state might fall, thus carving out room within a rigid legal formation for social experimentation and innovation. But the trust is not just a British, feudal, or even common law device—at the very moment that Maitland wrote, trusts were also being used across the colonial world to translate longstanding arrangements for collective property into the language of colonial law, allowing new charitable and communal purposes to emerge and be pursued within capitalist legal orders. Elsewhere, comparable institutions such as "waqf" and "patrimoine" have shaped and channeled the purposes of charity and the given form and power to both common wealth and private philanthropy. The trust deserves renewed ethnographic attention on just these terms: as it has provided legal form for collective purposes and the material basis of common existence; offered shelters for complex and often (but not always) marginalized kinds of communities; and helped separate personal interests from the intentions to which wealth is dedicated.
Moreover, the various instantiations of trusts offer a critical alternative to “incorporation” at a moment when both formerly personal rights and even quasi-individual identities are increasingly being credited to (business) corporations, individuals are encouraged to adopt techniques of incorporation to secure rights and recognition (Gershon 2014), and other public and private forms of social organization are delegitimized as a consequence. Incorporation is now often treated quite literally and singularly in law and political culture as the source of rights, legitimacy, and cognizable legal identity; in the words of the Comaroffs in Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), corporateness reappears in myriad ethnographic locations “less as a metaphor of social organization . . . than as a concrete legal reality”—and often the only available political reality for postcolonial groups. For ethnographers, property and law are thus urgent sites of exploration, as these become idioms of belonging or even a tangible "materialization of the social” (Greenhouse 2012), instituting neoliberal temporalities and durations (Maurer & Schwab 2006). This panel offers close examinations of the different configurations of property and of social time that have been enabled by trusts, as a way of thinking toward other materializations and alternative orderings of things and persons and mutual intentions. It gathers papers that examine the trust in places where it was elaborated as a technical legal device and political form, figuring responsibility, power, and freedom, including the US-occupied Philippines, austerity-era Britain and Ireland, and the contemporary United States and India.
Bill Maurer
University of California Irvine
Peter Kurie
Independent Scholar – Los Angeles
Nate Coben
PhD Candidate
University of California Irvine
Leilah Vevaina
Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Leilah Vevaina
Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Scott MacLochlainn
Postdoctoral Fellow
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Christa Tooley
Wheaton College
Leo Coleman
Associate Professor
CUNY - Hunter College
Leo Coleman
Associate Professor
CUNY - Hunter College