Codifying oral customary law froze living traditions into false uniformity.

Evidence

Among other initiatives, he compiled an extensive work in which he committed to writing the otherwise oral adat, identifying eighteen versions of it, when in fact the archipelago consisted of over a thousand islands, each with its own version (or versions) of adat. The writing down of adat “violated a primary principle of adat law theory, that the adat lived in local tradition. Now, written, it lived in books, which Dutch judges, and Indonesian judges half a century later, used as if they were codes.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 257

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains adat as living oral local tradition whose textual codification fundamentally violated its own nature.
• XREF: Analogizes to print culture studies (Eisenstein) and the Library history theme — committing the oral to writing changes the nature of the thing.
• STORYSTEM: A colonial official reducing a thousand oral legal traditions to eighteen written codes is a strong premise for a legal-fiction or counterfactual worldbuilding piece about the violence of systematization.