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18 Rev. Const. Stud. i (2013)

handle is hein.journals/revicos18 and id is 1 raw text is: Transgressing Categories: Studies on the Cohabitation of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Peoples'* Pierre Noreau, Jean Leclair* The thematic dossier offered here by the Review of Constitutional Studies raises one of the fundamental problems of collective life: that of the differences be- tween the various forms of existence and coexistence within human com- munities. Facing this problem requires that we distance ourselves from an abstract idea of constitutionalism or federalism, too frequently viewed as the formalized expressions of an improbable social contract whose terms have al- ready been definitely established. This very idea of a covenant settling and or- ganizing all of our political as well as our social relationships tends to congeal shifting realities into words and categories. The authors gathered in this issue strongly demonstrate that any fixed understanding of the frames into which our collective relationships develop is a negation of our day-to-day realities. They also reveal the limitations of our concepts and of our disciplines. Condemned as we are to understand the universe - as well as we are to share what we think we understand of it - we are quickly inclined to put it in categorical bottles. We are thus inevitably compelled to classify the diverse forms of collective existence into so many distinct categories: culture as a particular ideal concept, politics as a space for managing power, and law as a collection of our conventions, an inventory of promises we have made to one another. Our idea of culture and of communities of fate presents a particular prob- lem to the field of knowledge and action. Intellectually viewed as separate en- tities, these categories allow for the circumscription of fields of preferred and specific relationships. However, such a view only makes sense in a universe based on the solitude of these fields. In that perspective, each social configura- tion defines itself for its own sake. Then the only thing left to do is to establish the extent as well as of the depth of those fields. The federal principle, when viewed in this perspective, i.e., in its most superficial acceptation, offers a fac- 1 Pierre Noreau and Jean Leclair, Professors, Facult6 de droit, Universit6 de Montrial. The authors wish to acknowledge the help given by Pierre Leclair in the translation of parts of this text. Review of Constitutional Studies/Revue d'dtudes constitutionnelles i