The workshop series focuses on the global circulation of a technique (rather than a concept) known as ‘custom’, which has continued to develop since early modern legal practices. This technique is dedicated to employing a collaboration of bureaucratic knowledge and legal knowledge to register, investigate and ultimately ‘discover’ the normative ‘nature’ or ‘general spirit’ of different regions, thus weaving a mosaic of legal traditions. Legist-ethnographers monopolised the legitimacy to define the nature and expected behaviours of the surveyed subjects, effectively using empirical knowledge to establish normativity and transform empirical knowledge into normative knowledge. These legist-ethnographers may include jurists, judges, missionaries, moral theologians, legislators and legal historians.
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