Paper short abstract:

Nineteenth-century Prague was a place of struggle over the ethnic origin of legal-archival objects between Czechs and Germans. Drawing on several examples I illuminate that the objects were indispensable in constructing the ethnic communities as "folk" or "nation".

Paper long abstract:

Today, legal archives are usually relegated beyond constitutional concerns. Nineteenth-century Prague, once a capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Habsburg Empire, was nevertheless a place of intensive struggle over the ethnic origin of legal-archival objects between emerging modern nations of Czechs and Germans. Cultural leaders on both sides were often also archive explorers who attempt to nationalize the internal diversity of local laws within the Kingdom in the past and the present. They strategically used archival-legal objects in order to make sovereignty claims and construct the ethnic community in question through contradictory categories of "folk" or "nation". One example of this struggle is the ethnic status of Old Prague town law and the ownership of Prague castle in particular as both material and symbolical objects and things documented by both historical legal manuscripts and ancient symbols. This historical "constitutional ethnography" suggests that legal-archival objects were used in a twofold way. Archive explorers employed folkloristic and ethnographic (meta)discursive practices in order to ensure their legal and constitutional power as an embodiment of ethnic communities' continuous presence in the kingdom and also displaced the objects into the category "past" in order to secure community progress in period terms.