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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.