Spaces of Law and Custom

Introduction: Impure theories of custom and law -- PART 1: Custom, law and legality -- 1. Custom and primitivity: On the unity of the legal technique -- 2. A three-dimensional ontology of customs -- 3. Land tenure and irrigation in North Vietnam's mountainous regions: Rights outside the law? -- PART 2: Codifying customs in the face of social change -- 4. Oral custom: At the origin or at the fringes of law? -- 5. A written customary law among the Rwa in Tanzania -- 6. Are all informal normative facts custom? The ideological dimensions of company customs -- 7. Law, custom and social change in New Caledonia: A case-study: Gender reassignment on the customary civil register -- PART 3: Custom, law and property rights -- 8. When land and sky turn French: Is there any place left for the Bunong when private land property disrupts customary spaces along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border? -- 9. Proof and test: The construction of customary land in New Caledonia -- 10. Customary land rules in French Provence from the Ancien Régime to our days.

This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts. Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship. As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists.