Paper short abstract:

The paper will aim to draw upon the ongoing dialogue regarding the intersection between anthropological knowledge and legal practice in the context of asylum and broader migration framework and the broader issue of applicability of anthropology in legal setting.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper will aim to draw upon the ongoing dialogue regarding the intersection between anthropological knowledge and legal practice in the context of asylum and broader migration framework (Di Donato 2020; Gill and Good 2019), and the broader issue of applicability of anthropology in legal setting through the prism of “cultural expertise” (Holden 2021) by providing practical insights based on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Italy with immigration lawyers and refugee legal clinics.

Namely, in the context of the broader influx of migratory flows where the judges and decision-makers of “immigration countries” are increasingly being confronted with the need to make decisions based on the facts produced in different socio-cultural settings, the employment of anthropological (and more broadly the knowledge of social sciences) can be increasingly observed. The way this will take place, however, varies greatly from the respective legal systems of individual countries and the willingness of legal professionals to engage in it, as well as the judges to accept the anthropological analysis as “objective evidence”. Despite the recognized lack of education in social sciences that characterizes law schools, by observing lawyers as “cultural brokers” the paper will aim to demonstrate how anthropological knowledge is already being employed in the everyday practice of immigration lawyers and the implications it has on presenting the life stories of the asylum seekers and connecting them with the legal categories on refugee status determination; finally, this will be analysed through the issue of the “future of anthropology” and the need to rethink the way the discipline is thought and conceptualized (Foblets 2016), and indicate that the “application” of anthropology in the legal field can contribute both to the relevance of the discipline in the public sphere and contribute to its academic development.