It is a rare pleasure to have three excellent scholars read and comment on one's book and think about its implications for sociolegal studies. Each of these commentaries makes valuable suggestions for expanding and developing a sociolegal studies framework that incorporates history. Some suggestions would have improved the book, while others point to new projects that could contribute theoretically and methodologically to developing an historical approach to sociolegal studies.

In his insightful essay, Bill Maurer reminds us that in the law and culture equation, we have devoted far more attention to the analysis of the terms that anchor the equation ("law" and "culture") than to the meanings of the "and" itself. The same is true for "law" and "society," of course. Scholars have challenged the separation into two discrete entities that the "and" entails, but as Maurer points out, too few have explored what kinds of processes are subsumed under the term. The notion of mutually constitutive relations between law and culture is an advance over the notion that these are simply separate entities, but this formulation ignores the relative power relations of the two terms along with the complicated ways that one comes to shape the other. It seems similar to issuing mutual restraining orders in cases of domestic violence. In that case, the mutuality indicates that there is some interaction within the violence, but the nature of the blows, their sequence, their provocations, the way each assault changes the conditions for the next blow, are completely effaced in a framework of apparent equality entailed in the notion of mutuality. Similarly, once the interconnectedness of law and culture are acknowledged, the concept of mutual constitution does little analytic work in disentangling the important questions of power and change. These include the relative power of forms of law, law enforcement, legal consciousness, and legal regulation in forming cultural practices and the power of cultural practices to influence and channel legal regulations.

Maurer suggests that one way to deepen our analysis of the "and" is to consider techniques of personification and reification, to take seriously the objects of law such as documents, papers, texts, and forms. This is clearly a productive mode of inquiry. These instantiations of legal practice bring a fixity to legal relations which themselves constitute a form of power (see Riles 2004). Thinking about the "and" over time provides another way of conceptualizing this relationship. Although causality is notoriously elusive, an historical analysis provides at least one way of thinking about how change in one sphere is temporally related to others. One of the advantages of historical research is the possibility of tracing law's changing intervention in everyday life over time with relation to changes to politics, economics, and society, as I tried to do with nineteenth-century Hawai'i. Does this mean that the law produced culture, or that its changing operations were caused by changes in culture? Not in any simple sense, but it did appear in my research that the law was mobilized in different ways at different periods. Although it was often a means to control the social lives of new immigrants, the identities of the immigrants changed. Cultural definitions of groups that appeared dangerous shaped prosecution patterns, while features of these groups' everyday lives, such as smoking opium or gambling, were defined as worthy of legal intervention.

These examples show how law and culture are two sides of a system of power relations. Law is not equivalent to culture but is a distinctive set of institutions, practices, and rules used by states to exert control over everyday social life. Although law's rules, institutions, and practices are culturally formed, their exercise plays a particularly powerful role in forming the rules and practices of everyday life. Because law is linked to state power, law and culture are not two equal entities but fundamentally unequal in their access to power. As Maurer notes, the paradigm of law and culture is not exhausted; but the nature of the "and" requires further theoretical and empirical investigation. Historical analysis provides one approach to theorizing the "and" more extensively.

In Kunal Parker's thoughtful comments on my book, he notes that my approach to the analysis of the court records depends too heavily on a homogeneous notion of time. This is a very interesting idea, and I agree fully that an approach less bounded by the abstract grid of time would have provided a better grasp of the flow of events through this court. He points out that time itself is cultural, experienced according to different cultural logics by different groups such as Native Hawaiians and whites, a perspective that I do not consider in the book. Instead, I imposed a grid of years and case samples on my data long before I had any idea what the relevant time periods or categories of temporal experience might be. It is intriguing to consider what might have emerged had I done the study differently, in a way more attentive to the cultural construction of time. It would have produced a different book. I did return to the records to focus in more detail on domestic violence and wife desertion cases and analyzed all the cases for a sixty-year period rather than sampling every decade (Merry 2002). The advantage of this approach was greater flexibility in my temporal analysis and the possibility of following the patterns of particular individuals over time. By using litigants' names, I could trace reappearances in court over time. This also freed me from the time grid I had developed for analyzing the other court data. There was a more gradual ebb and flow of cases as well as a pattern of repeat users I observed earlier in New England courts (Merry 1990).

The focus of Parker's comments is the relationship between anthropological and historical conceptions of the field and the nature of data. His valuable comparison of anthropology and history and each discipline's understandings of the "field" emphasizes their differences. While I am persuaded that anthropologists and historians take different perspectives on the nature of the sources they have available to them and their open-endedness, I think the differences are far less stark than Parker suggests. Perhaps the differences do exist in their fantasies, as he suggests, but only there. While anthropologists begin from the notion that there are too many facts and too much context so that the problem is selection rather than discovery, they are also fully aware that some facts are more accessible than others and that ethnography is limited by the need to find places where people gather and social life takes place. Every ethnographer is conscious of all that he or she cannot observe, of the facets of social life that are closed to him or her, and of the limited slice that can be glimpsed and understood. Access to information may be easier with living subjects than with archives, but the sense of limitation and restriction is very present in ethnography as well. Theory alone does determine the "field" in anthropology; the nature of the field also shapes theory.

On the other hand, it seems to me that history operates with a more unbounded sense of facts than Parker suggests. Although I am not a professional historian, I found that beyond the core documents and texts I examined, the court records, there was a limitless expanse of private letters, photographs, journals, newspaper clippings, and missionary reports, which, despite my sustained efforts, I was unable to exhaust. Surely the professional historian has the same experience. As with ethnography, I was forced to select what seemed relevant to my theoretical concerns out of the vast sea of available materials. I have the impression that historians, at least in practice, if not in fantasy, face the same dilemma.

But is the data used by anthropologists different from those used by historians? In their historical anthropology, the Comaroffs work with data broader than the archive (1991, 1997). They look at the shape of houses, the clothing that people wore, the networks of trade that brought the clothing to them, the everyday habits of cultivators and market women, and the material forms that money assumes. This approach creates a space to examine the intersection of values, practices, and objects, a social space important to anthropological analysis but probably relevant to history as well. Maurer similarly advocates a focus on the objects, the physicality of evidence of law. There are certainly different ways of thinking about data in the two fields, but I am not persuaded that anthropology's view is as unbounded or history's as bounded as Parker suggests.