DR.

RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA

NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

LUCKNOW

JURISPRUDENCE

PROJECT ON
CONSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRPAHY

Under the Guidance of: Submitted by:

Dr. Manwendra Kumar Tiwari Pradyumna Poddar

Associate Professor V semester

DR.RMLNLU,[LUCKNOW] Section-B

Enroll. No. – 160101105

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgement ..................................................................................................................... 3

About the Author ....................................................................................................................... 3

Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 4

Brief Summary of the Article .................................................................................................... 4

Importance of Constitutional Ethnogrpahy over Constitutional Nationalism ........................... 5

Constitutional ethnography – Definition ................................................................................... 5

 Acknowledgement

I am most profoundly grateful to my teacher Dr. Manwendra Kumar Tiwari for providing me
this wonderful opportunity to work upon this project after doing which I feel to have
enlightened myself in this regard and for the precious time they spent guiding us for the
completion of this project.

This particular article gave me immense knowledge and insight how important it is to study
law and politics of various other nations before actually analysing any constitutional model.

About the Author

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International
Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at
Princeton. From 2005-2015, she was Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at
Princeton, after 10 years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law
School. Scheppele's work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law,
particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the
emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended
periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on
constitutional protections around the world. Her many publications in law reviews, in social
science journals and in many languages cover these topics and others. She is a public
commentator in the popular press, discussing comparative constitutional law, the state of
Europe, the transformation of Hungary from a constitutional-democratic state to one that risks
breaching constitutional principles of the European Union and European legal solutions to
European crises. Scheppele is an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative
Law and in 2014 received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential
scholarship. She held tenure in the political science department at the University of Michigan,
was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and
has taught in the law schools at Michigan, Yale, Humboldt/Berlin and (starting in January
2017) Harvard. From June 2017-2019, she will serve as the elected President of the Law and
Society Association. She is honored to be a visiting professor at Erasmus University in the
Netherlands in 2016-2017
 Abstract

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods
that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article
provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with
multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a
universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but
instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning
the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into
particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but
comprehension, not explained variation but thematization.

Brief Summary of the Article

Constitutions are not usually the subject of ethnography. Successful constitutions create a
political world in which political combat has well-recognized limits because constitutional
ideas are taken for granted and taken-for-granted ideas are hard to study. But one starts to see
precisely how constitutions work when alternatives proliferate, when dissent comes in the
form of challengers to constitutional normalcy and when practices that were once taken as
obvious have to be defended. When the taken-for-granted ceases to be obvious, constitutional
arguments have to be created and parried, and then we can hear what went without saying
before. We can find a strategic research site for constitutional ethnography in “counter-
constitutions” that present themselves as alternatives to constitutional normalcy.

In ethnographic investigation, the researcher focuses on practices and their meanings, on the
relationship between representations and what is understood as reality, on the way that ideas
work their way into habits and habits turn into institutions. An ethnographer is also interested
in documenting all of these processes when they go into reverse, and focuses on how the
obvious comes unraveled, how the real becomes simply a point of view and how institutions
are hollowed out from within and ultimately collapse. The study of counter-constitutions allows
us to see constitutions themselves more clearly because taken-for-granted ideas only become
visible when they have contenders.

Traditionally, “ethnography” has meant simply in-person, on-site fieldwork as the primary and
distinctive way to acquire information. But ethnography is now associated with a wider range
of methods that share a common goal, including archival work, analysis of material objects and
readings of cultural products. I will therefore present ethnography not as a single method, but
also an attitude toward a subject. Ethnography focuses on fields of meaning, lived
experience, the creation of knowledge, the sedimentation of that knowledge into social forms
and trajectories, and the uses of that knowledge to create common understandings that make
social activity possible and that make social products real. Hence the diversity of specific
methods that can fly under the banner of ethnography. Ethnography is the method that allows
one to take a phenomenological view of the social world.

Importance of Constitutional Ethnogrpahy over Constitutional Nationalism

Constitutional nationalism? At the opposite end of the constitutional studies spectrum from the
multivariate model approach are nationalist constitutional law, constitutional history, and
constitutional theory, which tend to prevail in single-country studies. The assumptions of a common
national ‘‘we’’ in the audience for a particular work pervade the literature. One often finds in single
country constitutional studies that scholars take for granted that their own constitution is the
theoretical pivot point of the legal world, not really thinking that their national constitution may be
either distinctive in ways relevant to their explanations or similar to other constitutions in ways that
may help them see better what is going on in their home polities. So a finding that is portrayed as
making a particular place unique and special may instead be an indicator that the country is subject
to trends visible elsewhere. Nationalist assumptions go deep into the structure of many single-
country constitutionalist writings, such studies are rarely translated out of their original language,
and comparisons across political systems become even harder to accomplish. Different nationally
specific concepts, categories, and explanations abound without a common sense of their shared
field of action. Constitutional ethnography is, in many ways, an attempt, both literally and
conceptually, to translate concepts across sites, times, and research questions.

Constitutional ethnography – Definition

Let’s try for a definition, however inadequate simple definitions can be: Constitutional
ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable
of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape.
It may help to explore the elements of this definition. The phrase ‘‘the central legal elements
of polities’’ indicates that constitutional law does not occupy all of the legal field, but only that
part of the legal field that constitutes, regulates, and modulates the key ingredients of
governance in a society. This phrase also requires distinguishing law from politics, at least in
part, because specifying the legal ‘‘elements’’ of politics presupposes that there is more to
politics than law. But this phrase also presupposes that law is not completely contained within
the concept of politics because if law were completely contained within politics, it could not
exist in some regulative relationship to politics
The ‘‘constitutional’’ part of constitutional ethnography, then, identifies the complex of
relations between law and politics that regulates governance. But while this most obviously
leads constitutional ethnographers to focus on the state, fields of law, politics, and governance
do not have to be conceptualized as being only about the state, though it would then require
some work to identify the politico-legal frameworks of governance in other social institutions.