Clio@Themis (Jun 2021)
De l’idéologie à la culture : les géographies coutumières
Abstract
Ever since the famous article “Système de la coutume” by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Annales, 1972), the customary geographies issue has become a common ground for historians, ethnologists and legal historians. The present paper explores the intellectual origins of this problematic in historiography and stresses three major underlying aspects: the principle of autonomy of kinship systems, the “photographical” character of legal sources and the cultural relativity associated with the structures which the study of inheritance patterns allows to indentify. Thus, the culturalist paradigm leads, from Herder to Savigny, from Klimrath to Yver and Le Roy Ladurie himself, to a questioning of the mere idea of culture, altogether as a sign and a cause of the geographical differentiations of the norms of social organisation.
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