96 Orientalism and Empireof Romantic self-discovery by which people learn they are “peoples”
(narody). Russian ideas about customary law were part of a widely
held ethnographic vision about mountaineer identity and the signifi-
cance of imperial rule. As in Russia, where customary law was por-
trayed as an attribute of a unique folk culture passed on through the
generations, Russian ethnographers and other students of mountain-
eer customary law believed that they offered insight into the history
of the mountaineer narody. That history was not, of course, one of
written laws but a history of customs. Customary law, wrote Lilov in
189 2, “in the eyes of the mountaineer has the sacred significance of a
law.”^42 Codifying customs, rather than collecting laws, was a means
of writing the history of a people. As mountaineer customary law en-
dured through the centuries, Russian ethnographers and administra-
tors believed, so did mountaineer folk identities. The assumptions
and interests of Russian educated society in the importance of peas-
ant custom and its relationship to national identity was extended by
ethnographers and regime officials to the borderlands.
“Peoples,” according to this common view, had rulers, centralized
adminstrations, and courts. Russians claimed, most forcefully when
they had the aid of educated mountaineers, that the mountaineers pos-
sessed such a history. Shora Nogmov’s Istoriia Adygeiskago naroda (The
history of the Adygei people) of 1847 emphasized the court system and
unified administration of the late-sixteenth-century ruler Prince
Berslan Dzhankutov.^43 For N.F. Grabovskii, a Russian ethnographer of
the late nineteenth century, such evidence was proof that contempo-
rary Kabards (“eastern” Adygei) possessed the necessary historical
prerequisites that made possible “the existence of a nation [natsiia].”^44
This was a problematical line of reasoning in a multi-ethnic empire,
and Grabovskii must have been aware that in Europe the question of
legal codification was closely related to the unification of the modern
nation-state. Germany’s National Liberals, for example, did not want
to see the different states of the North German Confederation produce
distinct legal codes, but advocated a single and unified German law
code, which was to correspond to a united Germany.^45 But Kabard was
a long way from Frankfurt, and Russians such as Grabovskii could jus-
tify their colonial rule if it served to encourage the mountaineers in the
proper direction. Grabovskii was also uncommon in his use of this
term – most Russians spoke of peoples (narody) rather than nations –
and his historical memory was remarkably selective. Kabards, in his
view, shared in the historical potential enabled by Berslan Dzhankutov,
while the Adygei proper of the Black Sea coastal region, as he was
surely aware, had been destroyed by the Russian army and exiled en
masse to Ottoman Turkey in 1861–64.