Practices are legitimate and bounded prior to any description of them.

Evidence

Practices, however, consist in many kinds of uses. Practices differ in kind-unlike the undifferentiated slab of meat that arrives for the butcher’s work, practices are already differentiated. … Some are evaluative, some are legal, some are aesthetic, pedagogical, political. Existing practices are subject to description-their contours, though often disputed, can be discerned. Practices are legitimate before they are described. They are bounded before their boundaries are drawn by the cartographer. A cartographer’s map may be adduced in a border dispute, but that is only because the boundedness at issue was already well understood. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 444

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the key distinction between a practice as a lived activity and the grammarian’s imposed reconstruction of it.
• XREF: Directly parallels legal positivism debates about whether law is a social practice prior to its formal systematization (Hart, Fuller).