The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Post-Colonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK

The Crown stands at the heart of the New Zealand, British, Australian and Canadian constitutions as the ultimate source of legal authority and embodiment of state power. A familiar icon of the Westminster model of government, it is also an enigma. Even constitutional experts struggle to define its attributes and boundaries: who or what is the Crown and how is it embodied? Is it the Queen, the state, the government, a corporation sole or aggregate, a relic of feudal England, a metaphor, or a mask for the operation of executive power? How are its powers exercised? How have the Crowns of different Commonwealth countries developed? The Shapeshifting Crown combines legal and anthropological perspectives to provide novel insights into the Crown's changing nature and its multiple, ambiguous and contradictory meanings. It sheds new light onto the development of the state in postcolonial societies and constitutional monarchy as a cultural system.

• A novel anthropological analysis of the Crown and the political and legal work that it performs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK.
• Examines the Crown's fluid, contested and contradictory meanings and the implications of this for political legitimacy, sovereignty and governance in postcolonial societies.
• Provides comparative and ethnographic perspectives on the role of the Crown in postcolonial Australia, Canada New Zealand and Britain, and assesses which country will be first to become a republic.
• Analyses arguments about constitutional reform and offers new anthropological insights into the meanings of monarchy as a symbolic system