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.

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