Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the construction of evidence and the production of judicial knowledge; focusing in particular on the reasoning of the detectives working the case. Issues of how knowledge can be conceptualised and studied anthropologically are addressed.

Paper long abstract:

'Reasoning' as a mode of detective work has mainly been investigated as the working of the mind - as rationalities or methodologies - brought to use to make sense of the social world, in order to translate it into a legal rationality and bureaucratic objectivity. The icon of this detective method and thinking, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, embodies this perspective of the individual minds logical workings, and the victory of logical inferences in the detection of the culprit of the crime and the reconstructive disclosure of the event as it 'really happened'. This paper, taking point of departure in this Cartesian idea of investigation, tries to dismantle the idea of the individual logical minds prominence with reference to ethnography of 'real' detective work performed by detectives within the Danish Police. It is argued, that by comparing the investigation and fact-finding of investigators, with animistic hunters, exemplified in Smith's presentation of Athapaskan hunters and Chipewyan ontology, we find a prism for better interpreting the activities and knowledge processes of the community assembled during a criminal investigation. This analytical move is not made to make ethnographic comparison or establish detectives in terms of more 'primitive' modes of producing knowledge; but to be able to point to some of the very subtle, implicit and experience-based processes of bureaucratic knowledge; and to underline the social character of 'mind' when discussing 'knowledge' production - even in the modern western tradition - with its preference for the 'rational disembodied and individualistic' mind, over the subjective faculties of the body and senses.