Constitutional Ethnography as a Method: A Critical Reading of The Palimpsest Constitution

Shohini Sengupta

PhD Candidate, University of New South Wales & Associate Professor, Jindal School of Banking and Finance, India

Melissa Crouch’s book begins and ends with a call to attention on the worlds and peoples that help construct, make, destroy, and re-make constitutions – the ‘social life of constitutions’. The social life of constitutions invites scholars to think of the constitutional legacies of ideas, practices, and institutions of past constitutions to acknowledge tragedies, suffering and loss in constitution-making.

In addition to being a major contribution to the study of constitutionalism in the Global South and elsewhere, the book is particularly significant in placing people and everyday lives at the centre of constitutional discourse and method of enquiry.

Melissa Crouch urges  us to consider people as agentic actors, even people in authoritarian and military contexts who are often only seen through the lens of tragedy and oppression. These people occupy and shape the many forms of alternate and resistant futures, using the language of constitutional rule. The palimpsest constitution is, therefore, ‘fluid and not fixed, interactive, and remade by people, not removed from them.’

I find Melissa’s book to be not only a view into Myanmar’s constitutional past and present, but a method to read law through an expansive, pluralistic, interdisciplinary, and immersive manner, a method that Melissa calls ‘constitutional ethnography’. It is this method of reading constitutional law, or law in general, that I find both persuasive and a compelling methodological contribution to the study of law and not limited to Myanmar alone.

In my reading of this beautifully crafted book, constitutional ethnography is not merely a method of appreciating the constitutional histories of Myanmar. It is also a radical approach to      reading law and history. This project challengesmainstream Western liberal traditions of law that either tend to read the Global South as a place of ‘less than’, ripe for intervention, or as a place that can exist alongside liberal constitutional values, never as a challenge to it.

Constitutional ethnography, therefore, helps us understand world-making, and world-making through law, but also through memory and politics, scripts, actors, archives – both living and non-human. The book renders constitutionalism as much more than science or politics, but as a re-inscription of memory, history, and enduring palimpsest constitutions. In this way, the book opens up the field to seeing law and legal legacies in everyday, unlikely places.

This book also sits within a broader and growing tradition of thinking not simply in binary terms of the Global South and the North, but in common shared histories and legacies of older territorial boundaries, the horrors of colonialism, and the formation of post-colonial nation-states. Constitutional ethnography as a way of exploring the cultural power of law and legalities opens to us possibilities of reading disparate (or what may seem today as disparate) geographies together. For instance, the legacies of partitions (all five of them) in the Indian subcontinent tie      what today we see as disparate regions, from Myanmar or Burma then to the Gulf states of Oman, the UAE and Yemen. The process of political decolonisation and modern constitution-making cannot be separated from these older connections of lands and peoples and histories.

The book is particularly effective in directing our gaze to these older histories and legacies of colonialism in this region, and how then these ‘older’ constitutional and legal legacies are used as an oppositional force to prop up newer constitutions. Melissa shows us how modern constitutions (and perhaps law in general) are palimpsests because they draw on previous constitutional principles, scripts, and politics—comparative, transnational, and domestic - and that this act of constitution-making cannot be separated from the act of producing a nation-state itself, but particularly a post-colonial nation-state.

So, even though this book is about Myanmar and constitution-making in particular, I found it generative to think with others on these shared histories of violence and tragedy, and to think more productively about the law, places, and people/life now. A turn to these forms of situated knowledges (situated in shared legacies and histories), through constitutional ethnography, can help transcend the violent territorial and epistemological boundaries and boundary-making functions of modern law and constitutions in many parts of the world.

The book therefore opens the Third World itself as a place that, even if only in moments, can offer literal and theoretical resistance to, and not just sit alongside, liberal constitutional law.

In this, ultimately, the book offers methodological pathways to scholars across disciplines and geographies, to build critical solidarities (and in this it goes beyond methodology), from situated knowledges to possibilities of rage, resistance, creation and negations. Melissa ends the book by stating that ‘people can rewrite the palimpsest constitution, an idea that contains within it the seeds of hope.’ It is this hope that binds us all in critical and urgent ways to the political project of understanding law and life, not simply in military and authoritarian contexts but in the interstices of life across the world.

Shohini Sengupta is a Teaching Fellow & HDR Candidate at the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW, Sydney. She is on leave from the Jindal School of Banking & Finance, O.P. Jindal Global University (India), where she is an Associate Professor of Law. Her work explores the impacts of law and technology on substantive citizenship in India. She is on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).

Suggested Citation: Shohini Sengupta, ‘Constitutional Ethnography as a Method: A Critical Reading of the Palimpsest Constitution’ IACL-AIDC Blog (3 November 2026), https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2026-posts/2026/11/3/constitutional-ethnography-as-a-method-a-critical-reading-of-the-palimpsest-constitution