Legal and Cultural Construction of the Maori Corporate Person

Abstract

Our understandings of what corporations are—narratives of why they exist, who they serve, and their basic ontological status—matter for the way in which legal and ethical responsibilities become imputed to them. Interactions between the law of corporations and ordinary peoples’ thinking about themselves (as agents, as owners, and as responsible, or not, for an organization’s adherence to social mores) contribute to the way in which they imagine the corporation to be. Beyond the question of personhood, then, is the question of how the jurisprudence of the corporation is (en)cultured. To tease apart the multiple layers of this inquiry—to make the anthropologist’s move of rendering the familiar strange—it is useful to shift our attention to less typically encountered uses of the corporate form; here, a look at Indigenously owned corporations provides that new perspective. This slant view makes apparent new intersections between understandings of the reasons for corporate existence and the rights that the corporation might properly claim, suggesting the crucial role that these intersections might play in theorizing the corporation.