After more than twenty-five years on the legal landscape of Papua New Guinea, 'customary law' is ripe for reassessment, particularly as it appears to be an ideal mechanism with which the Papua New Guinean state can meet some of its obligations to a burgeoning body of international law. This article addresses the need to understand customary law in the context of its varying usage across different legal domains in an archetypally pluralistic state. In contrast to older approaches focusing on the problematic interface between an exogenous legal system and indigenous methods of dispute settlement, my concern is with the ways in which these distinct legal forms have fared in each other's company since independence in 1975. Case-studies from a village court and an urban national court demonstrate that village court magistrates and high court judges alike use custom and law as strategic sources of authority.While village courts take custom for granted and therefore must 'discover' law, high courts take law for granted and must 'discover' custom. These processes indicate that, rather than being hybridized as 'customary law', the distinctiveness of custom and law are often maintained in order for one to appear as a resource upon which the other can draw.

Boystown, mi hamamas tru long em Boystown, mi save laikim yu tumas Boystown, yu save givim mi olgeta Boystown, mi save laikim yu tumas -A lyric about Port Moresby by George Telek ( 2000) 1 [Boystown, I really enjoy it Boystown, I know I like you far too much Boystown, you give me everything Boystown, I know I like you far too much]I n an accidental city, accidental social forms manifest, including forms that may have no discernible historical precedent. In this article, I seek to triangulate between Doreen Massey's (2005) sociotemporality of space, Henri Lefebvre's (1996, 158) concept of the "right to the city," and the uneven crystallization of gender and class in a women's boarding house in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Haus Ruth, as this respected institution is known, generates a dynamic relation between the colonial history of the city in which it has developed and the aspirational futures of the women who live there. I argue that while the par- 1 The verse is in Tok Pisin, and the translation is by the author. Tok Pisin is the Melanesian creole that serves as Papua New Guinea's primary lingua franca; the country boasts some 800 vernacular languages. Tok Pisin is now the first language of many people brought up in Port Moresby and other towns, along with English, which is still the language of education, government, and commerce.My residence in Haus Ruth for three months was made possible by British Academy grant no. SRG-49399. Earlier versions of this article benefited from feedback at the 2010 European Society of Oceanists conference in St. Andrews and also from John Cox, Timothy Sharp, and Ilana Gershon. I am grateful also for the recommendations of the anonymous reviewers for Signs, which helped to make this a much stronger article. I wish finally to acknowledge the staff and volunteers of Haus Ruth, who made my stay there so congenial and who, far more importantly, work tirelessly to look after women in Port Moresby whose relations have failed them.

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This article approaches the relationship between the categories of custom and law by means of an experiment with cartographic metaphors of scale and location. In Papua New Guinea, the relationship of custom to law is configured by the canonization of custom (the concept as it is known in studies of legal pluralism) in the Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea and in the Underlying Law Act 2000. However, the status of this universalizing category is complicated by its relationship to the putatively local category of kastom, as it is known throughout Papua New Guinea. I argue that the two categories, custom and kastom, do not share an equivalent relationship to law because they occupy different levels of scale. In the discourses of legal elites, custom encompasses kastom. Whereas for many “smaller‐scale” ethnic and language groups within the country, kastom and law are simply two potential categories of efficacious action, among many others, in highly specific and localized “mixes.” These mixes lose their intelligibility when elites attempt to replicate them at the level of the state.

The “cultural defense” in criminal law presents anthropologists with an instance of culture being used as a particular sort of tool, in this case, a tool for revealing the intentions of a defendant. In deploying culture instrumentally, courts in the United States and the United Kingdom constitute their other instruments and indeed their own environments as noncultural. By comparison, courts in Papua New Guinea do not use culture as a means of discovering intentions; indeed, it can be argued that although “custom” is enshrined in the Constitutional law of the country, “culture” hardly appears at all in Papua New Guinean arguments. Case material from the three legal settings illustrates that far from offering a recognition of culture, the cultural defense acts to limit the culture concept to the status of one diagnostic mechanism among other, noncultural ones.