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Ethnographic lawyering, conspiracy, and the origins of Al Qaeda

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2260091
AutoresDarryl Li (0000-0002-8041-1285, Department of Anthropology University of Chicago IL USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen125
Número3
Páginas559-569
Fecha de publicación2023-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13873
OpenAlexW4380446073
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas34

This article delineates a particular orientation to combining professional legal training and anthropological scholarship that I call ethnographic lawyering. Ethnographic lawyering takes legal form as an object of anthropological analysis, loosely inspired by the Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis's theorization of law as a social relation. If ethnographic method in anthropology entails theorizing from the concepts and experiences of interlocutors, then ethnographic lawyering analytically centers the subjectivities, logics, and relationalities that legal form both presupposes and animates. Ethnographic lawyering brings to light the contingent lives of legal form. To demonstrate this method, the article uses the example of conspiracy in early US court cases involving Al Qaeda, informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and anthropologist in litigation arising from the war on terror. An ethnographic lawyering approach illuminates how conspiracy's distinct forms in criminal law, the law of evidence, and tort law each bring far-flung subjects, events, and actions together into reified entities even as they atomize and recombine social relations. This dynamic tension resembles the vertiginous nature of conspiracy theorizing in general

Epistemology · Ethnography · Object (grammar · Political science · Relation (database · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law