Abstract
This article intends to reveal how Yapese people recognize legal pluralism in Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia. Legal pluralism is defined as the situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same state or society. Legal pluralists insisted that daily normative orders not attached to the state are also 'legal' and should be called 'non-state law' or 'customary law'. They criticized legal centralism only focusing on state law and emphasized that researchers should focus not only on legal discourses in the legal arena but also on people's narratives and practices in their daily lives when examining legal situations and dynamics in colonial and postcolonial societies. However, recent studies of colonial/postcolonial law seem to return to legal centralistic view and overlook the people's daily narratives and practices. In this article I spell out the process of a dispute over a sea area in Yap and reveal the diversity of litigants' recognitions of the relation between the state law and yalen, or the network of social relationships which forms, and are formed by, people's everyday practices. This diversity of the recognitions indicates the multiplicity and plurality of the people's realities of legal pluralism in postcolonial Yap.
