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- Convenors:
-
Berkant Caglar
(University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Sofia Pinedo-Padoch (Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung)
Anna Wherry (Johns Hopkins University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Legal documents offer anthropologists insight into political violence. Yet these records are partial, shaped by power, surveillance, and legal procedures. This panel considers how ethnographers navigate such partiality, analyzing documents as living entities and pushing methodological limits.
Long Abstract
Legal documents have long provided anthropologists with a crucial archival foundation for studying political violence and its aftermath. Yet these state records are always partial and fragmentary. Ethnographic work has shown how court and legal documents are the outcome of power relations, subject to scrutiny by the state’s judicial bodies and bearing the imprint of surveillance. Judges and bureaucrats, moreover, omit from the written record important sensory details that unfold in a courtroom yet are deemed “unimportant” to legal procedure, such as the applause, shouts, cries, and other performative engagements of plaintiffs. This panel aims to consider how legal documents and their partiality are negotiated in ethnographic research on violence. We invite anthropologists to reflect on how they creatively engage with such documents, not only as the residues of bureaucratic tools but as living entities that require ethnographers to read against the grain, attending to their silences and erasures. Papers might consider, for instance, how researchers trace these silences in their readings of documents; how they reconstruct missing information and collaborate with interlocutors to fill the gaps; how affective, sensory, and performative engagement with court documents impacts ethnographic methods; or how interluctors contest the partiality and how they mobilize their own documents as counter archives against official narratives in legal documents. We are also interested in the active ways these documents are cross-checked and compared, such as using courtroom ethnography as a research strategy, or by tracing trials over an extended temporal frame, including their aftermath.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Through an ethnographic study of a court trial of an academic historian who was accused of being a communist spy, I will discuss how communist secret service archives have become a site of contending notions of truth, democracy, solidarity, and justice in postsocialist Poland.
Paper long abstract
While communism was proclaimed dead in Eastern Europe around 1989, archives of communist secret services lived on. They became the site of judicial and moral examination of lives, suspicions of treason or 'collaboration' with the criminalized communist regime, and contending notions of democracy, truth, and justice. In Poland, lustration is initiated as a transitional justice process to publicly disclose and ban the persons identified as communist spies from public office on the basis of using communist secret service documents as a source of evidence and truth. However, these documents have been much contested for containing incomplete and misleading information. By drawing on my recently published monograph, I will offer an ethnographic analysis of the lustration court trial of a history professor to study how legal officials and the lustrated professor navigate the uncertainties and suspicions inscribed into the surveillance documents in the mode of what I call “moral autopsy” that treats communism as a dead past and regime of criminality and treachery, the truth of which is to be “dissected” in the persons associated with communism. But as my ethnography suggests, the court proceedings also harbor moments of rupture that unsettle the legal-moral ideology of lustration, that is, moral autopsy, and flesh out an alternative history of friendship and solidarity that unravels through legal performances.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how seemingly minor, technical jurisdictional decisions at Colombia’s transitional justice court are reshaping the history of the country’s war from one of narco-terrorism to political rebellion in the wake of peace.
Paper long abstract
This paper argues that seemingly minor, technical jurisdictional decisions at Colombia’s transitional justice court are reshaping the history of the country’s war from one of narco-terrorism to political rebellion. Beginning in the 1990s, amid the rise of the U.S.–led War on Drugs, the Colombian state prosecuted suspected militants as narco-terrorists in criminal courts rather than as subversives in military courts, thereby denying the conflict’s political character. The 2016 peace accords marked a reversal: the FARC was formally recognized as a political actor, and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) was created to adjudicate crimes committed in the now-recognized armed conflict. Amnesty for minor offenses such as drug trafficking—a central component of the agreement—was designed to erase criminal records, free ex-combatants from prison, and support their reintegration. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bogotá with magistrates, lawyers, and former militants, the paper traces a single amnesty case excluded on jurisdictional grounds. In so doing, it reveals how the court must reconstruct decades-old criminal records produced when the war was officially framed as “narco-terrorism,” and read these archives against the grain to decide which acts count as political crimes of “the conflict” under its jurisdiction and which remain “ordinary” crimes for the penal courts.
Paper short abstract
This paper theorizes courtroom ethnography as a tool for data collection under political violence, allowing anthropologists to engage with complex legal knowledge, gaps in the court records, and to establish interpersonal and sensory relations that cannot be confined to the litigation process.
Paper long abstract
This paper theorizes courtroom ethnography as a method that enables the critical collection of documents and bureaucratic procedures under conditions of political violence and attends to the emergence of archival court records. Although legal anthropologists are entangled with legal knowledge to the extent that their research practices may mimic those of lawyers, I first conceptualize what it means to collect court data without having formal legal training and outline ways of approaching the legal technicalities observed in the court. This tension between understanding too little of what is going on and understanding too much is instructive for thinking about court decisions in oppressive contexts. I then show that courtroom ethnography is more than attending a hearing; it is an interpersonal and temporally complex practice that allows researchers to establish relations with lawyers, court personnel, reporters, and human rights activists—relations that cannot be confined to the hearing itself.
By specifically tracing disputes over the presence of undercover agents in court, I empirically examine right-to-protest trials in Turkish courtrooms and the experiences of queer defendants in Pride March cases. Although freedom of assembly is protected as a constitutional right in Turkey, these trials show how different laws (No.2911; No.5237) serve to limit political activity and facilitate incarceration. As a queer researcher “out” in the field (Lewin and Leap 2002), I document activists’ performances and their semiotic and bodily practices, sensory dynamics, such as tension, vocal interventions, tonality as a linguistic quality, and audience responses that are absent from official court records.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines postwar legal correspondence in two Hungarian-speaking family archives in Bratislava, Slovakia, tracing efforts to recover confiscated property. Using letters, photos, camp diaries, and interviews, it reconstructs the affective climate of exclusion in postwar Slovakia.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines legal documents preserved in the archives of two Hungarian-speaking families in Bratislava, Slovakia, focusing on their postwar efforts to reclaim real estate and personal property that had been unlawfully confiscated. Through an analysis of official correspondence with state authorities in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the paper explores how family members sought legal redress within a hostile and exclusionary political environment.
After the war, Hungarians in Slovakia who refused reslovakization were classified as enemies of the Slovak nation and held collectively responsible for the conflict. Many were imprisoned in labour camps, stripped of their citizenship, and dispossessed of their property. In Bratislava, affluent individuals of German and Hungarian background were interned in the Petržalka camp. After their release, surviving Hungarian families engaged in years of correspondence with representatives of the Slovak state in an attempt to recover confiscated property and possessions.
Drawing on official letters from two family archives, as well as photographs, labour-camp diaries, and interviews with family members, the presentation reconstructs the affective and moral atmosphere of postwar Slovakia, marked by exclusion, resentment, and institutionalized hostility. Situated within anthropological research on the Infrastructure of Forced Deportation project (2023–2025), the analysis highlights how bureaucratic procedures extended violence beyond the moment of displacement itself. By foregrounding these archival struggles, the paper also offers a lens for interpreting comparable dynamics in contemporary Eastern Europe, where processes of exclusion and authoritarianism are again intensifying.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, we examine the epistemological and methodological dilemmas and potentials of using legal archaeology to analyze the mobilization, contestation, and constitution of expert knowledge in asylum litigation.
Paper long abstract
The highly politicized context in which asylum operates, combined with evidentiary challenges, has made decision-making complex and contested. Various forms of expertise are increasingly drawn upon to facilitate or challenge state power in appeal processes. In this paper, we examine the epistemological and methodological dilemmas and potentials of using legal archaeology to analyze the mobilization, contestation, and constitution of expert knowledge in asylum litigation.
The paper draws on research carried out in Norway, Denmark and Sweden that combined courtroom ethnography and legal archaeology. Whereas courtroom ethnography is limited to following cases of relatively short duration onwards, legal archaeology traces the trajectory of cases and their sociohistorical context backwards. Legal archaeology aims to construct ‘thick’ description and analysis by working backward and outward from clues embedded in judicial decisions. It involves close attention to the layering of multiple documents and draws on a range of legal and non-legal sources (e.g. case files, previous legal decisions in the cases, newspaper accounts, interviews). Adopting this methodology raises an epistemological dilemma in terms of reading along or against the grain of legal documents. On the one hand, the methodology urges us to take legal technicalities seriously to understand what legal strategies and knowledge claims acquire authority. On the other hand, the focus on contestation inside and outside the courtrooms across time highlights the fragmentary nature of those claims, showing how adversary strategies and claims of knowledge emerge. As such, this methodology offers ways to reinterpret cases, posing novel questions about law and knowledge production.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Indian courts regulate ritual practice of Sati (widow immolation) by reading legal documents ethnographically. It shows how law records violence selectively, silencing emotion and ritual, and how these gaps are challenged through alternative documents and lived practices.
Paper long abstract
Sati (Widow immolation) refers to a historically outlawed practice that survives today in the form of ritual commemoration and temple worship. This paper examines how legal documents shape and obscure the understanding of violence through an ethnographic engagement with an Indian court case between a temple committee and the State of Rajasthan, which centres on whether such worship constitutes the illegal “glorification” of sati under Indian law.
Rather than approaching the case as a question of legal compliance, this paper treats court documents as partial and politically produced artefacts. Drawing on close readings of petitions, affidavits, and judgments, alongside courtroom observation and ethnographic engagement with temple authorities and devotees, it shows how judicial records prioritise intent, evidence, and procedure while excluding sensory, affective, and performative dimensions of ritual life such as chanting, bodily discipline, emotional display, and gendered ideals of sacrifice and honour.
Methodologically, the paper demonstrates how ethnographers read against the grain of legal texts by tracing silences, contradictions, and moments of juridical discomfort, and by situating documents within the social worlds that exceed them. It further explores how interlocutors contest state narratives by mobilising alternative materials, including temple records, pamphlets, photographs, and oral histories as counter-archives that assert legitimacy and continuity.
By foregrounding the gap between legal reason and lived practice, this paper argues that the partiality of legal documents is not merely a limitation but a crucial entry point for understanding how violence is reconfigured, denied, and normalised through law.
Paper short abstract
In this paper I examine a bound folder of the 1936–37 suit over the Gyanvapi mosque–Kashi Vishvanath compound in Banaras (Varanasi, India), as fragmented evidence and ethnographic object, showing how its uses mediate spatial histories and contemporary claims.
Paper long abstract
This paper revolves around a bound folder containing the proceedings of a 1936–37 suit over access to the Kashi Vishvanath temple and Gyanvapi mosque compound in Banaras (Varanasi, India)—a site central to ongoing campaigns by Hindu nationalist groups claiming it as originally Hindu. The folder was shown to me in 2016 by Kedarnath Vyas, then head of the Brahmin family historically responsible for managing the area between temple and mosque, with whom I had a long-term ethnographic relationship. The folder testifies to centuries of contestations (not exclusively Hindu–Muslim) and sheds light on multiple oral histories of the compound.
I read the folder against the grain while also examining how it was mobilised, despite the absence of certain documents (e.g., land titles), by the Vyas family at a particularly vulnerable moment. This allows reflection on how courts, papers and silences produce partial and fragmented evidence, which is currently reworked and invoked by contrasting parties to assert ritual legitimacy, authority and historical claims.
By tracing both the historical making of evidence and its contemporary afterlives, the paper shows how legal documents function as living archives and productive ethnographic objects. It illuminates the intertwined temporalities of ethnography, court proceedings and politics in Banaras, contributing to an understanding of the role of legal documents in shaping contestations over religious space, ritual authority and heritage.