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.

DEFINE: Distinguishes between practices as pre-existing, differentiated human activities and the cartographic descriptions of them — a key conceptual distinction.

Philip Chase Bobbitt, Philip Chase Bobbitt - Refl…, loc. 444