Perpetuities Against Rules: Law, Ethnography and the Measuring of Lives

The writing of culture (ethno-graphy) that has characterized the modern anthropological endeavor has come under critique for measuring the lives of Others according to its own peculiar normative and temporal logics, and then eliding the fact that it is doing so. The same is true of law, where the writing of human action gets figured in ways that always involve some un-ruly combination of legal fact and norm, and the temporal trajectories that are implicit in them. The effect in both modes of knowledge production is a kind of representative impossibility such that the authority claims made by law and ethnography are always exceeded by the actual lives whose measure they take. In this article, I suggest that it is in its confrontation with the lives and times of inheritance in two contexts – in the famous problems posed in Anglo-American law by the Rule Against Perpetuities, and the irresolution of inheritance disputes in Hopi tribal court – that law is most starkly revealed as a kind of ethnography, a writing of culture replete with all the problems of measuring lives that go along with it.