The aim of this seminar is to understand how the actors of colonising nations (missionaries, colonial administrators, practising or academic jurists, etc.) apprehend the normative systems of territories before and during colonisation and then afterwards, in the context of decolonisation. In the various parts of the (future) colonial territories, how did Westerners ‘learn [about] legal norms’, often linked to religion, and sometimes very different in spirit and form from their own legal culture? For the colonisers, understanding local norms was often an essential prerequisite for controlling the colonised societies. In many territories, for example, magistrates had the competence to apply some of these local rules in disputes involving natives. More generally, however, the interest shown by certain actors in local norms gave rise to an ethnological type of scholarly production that was separate from the issues of colonial domination. Far from the dialectic between knowledge and power, some academics have taken advantage of studies on local rights to rework the problem of the classification of rights within the framework of a broader comparative law.
From the perspective of the history of knowledge, the aim of this seminar is to identify the ways in which local norms have been apprehended and reworked. In the different zones of the colonial empires, who were the actors in the early days of legal ethnology, and what were their genealogies? How, by whom and with what methodology (translations, questionnaires, informants, intermediaries) were these norms investigated? What types of scholarly production did this work give rise to (travel accounts, teaching manuals, articles in specialist journals, grey literature, etc.)? What links did the jurists have with ethnologists? In what organisations and with what support and funding did they carry out their work? What were the different stages in the development of ethnological knowledge of law (teaching, disciplinarisation, creation of dedicated journals or publishing collections, creation of chairs or institutions, etc.)? This question is all the more important given that scholarly production on local rights was frequently subsequently taught in various institutions, thus freezing a certain vision of these norms, sometimes passed on to the Indigenous students themselves.
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