Orientalism and Empire. North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917

109 Customary Law

nineteenth-century ethnographers had identified as “custom,” and
they anticipated a future unburdened by the legacy of the past.
P.Tabolov associated “all customary law and tradition” with “stagna-
tion,” a “weapon of deception” in the hands of the kulaks.^124 The
power of the Soviet state in the North Caucasus quickly exceeded the
ambitions of even imperial proponents of the statist legal tradition.