Greg Rawlings (Anthropology, Otago, NZ)
Statelessness, Citizenship and Annotated Discriminations: Meta
Documents, the United Nations and the Aesthetics of the Subtle in
Colonial Contestations of Human Rights
From 1906-1980 the Indigenous population of Vanuatu (New Hebrides) were stateless. They had no citizenship. As a result, in 1945 the British legal adviser in the condominium observed that Indigenous [Ni-Vanuatu] New Hebrideans could be subjected “to the orders of French and British officials, could be punished administratively without trial”, were under the jurisdiction of four different legal systems, births, deaths and marriages could not be “officially registered”, the consumption of alcohol was forbidden and there was no “recognised legal way that property could be disposed of inter vivos or after death” (NHBS 3/2/40/6). This denial of citizenship contravened Article 15(1) of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, affirming, “Everyone has the right to a nationality.” The New Hebrides joined a number of British colonies that received UN scrutiny for racial discrimination, economic negligence and human rights violations. In the archives of the Western Pacific High Commission (WPHC) and the New Hebrides British Service (NHBS) are a series of files outlining how British colonial officials negotiated and contested UN conventions, declarations and resolutions. These invoke the aesthetics of the subtle: hand written annotations on official correspondence, exclamation marks against “difficult questions of policy” and legal opinions on how to “interpret” and account for dubious colonial practices. This paper argues that these aesthetics of the subtle comprise meta-documents that obscured, negated and downplayed the contested character of colonial governance and its infringements in an era when the telos of decolonisation informs the narrative of imperial to postcolonial political change."
Gregory Rawlings is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Gender and Sociology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. With a PhD in social anthropology from the Australian National University that examined in-situ urbanisation in Vanuatu, he teaches on globalisation, transnationalism and the anthropology of money. His research is in the areas of political, legal and economic anthropology and is informed by inter-disciplinary collaborations. Specifically, Greg researches and has written on offshore finance centres, money laundering and taxation. Since his PhD he has carried out multi-sited research on offshore finance in Guernsey, Singapore, Samoa and Andorra and on money laundering in the Netherlands. He is now developing new research projects that are informed by thematic interests in law and society, together with history and anthropology to examine questions of 'race', citizenship and human rights in the archive, particularly in the Pacific and more broadly as part of general British colonial policy in the twentieth century.
