Legal Practitioners and Anthropologists in Dialogue : Returning to the Spirit of Complementarity and Collaboration

In this introduction to the volume, the editors think methodologically about the practical implications of collaboration between anthropologists and legal practitioners. One thing to keep in mind when reflecting on the relationship between practitioners and experts is Douglas Holmes and George Marcus's (2008) concept of ‘para-ethnography’ – the idea that anthropologists can usefully develop or cultivate a collaborative relationship with high-level experts in circumstances in which their different forms of knowledge (or ‘epistemic communities’) are brought together in a common venture, based on shared understanding of the ethnographic project and a collaborative production of knowledge. This approach to ethnography involves reflexive practice, oriented toward collaborative understanding of the institutional world of the expert. The introduction takes the issues addressed in the contributions to this volume beyond their immediate applied implications, and provides a starting point for us to think more methodologically and theoretically about how para-ethnography can be usefully applied to the collaborative relationships of anthropologists, lawyers, and claimants working towards shared knowledge in the interests of common strategic goals. Conceived of in this way, the authors see a much wider range of situations and struggles in which anthropological and legal knowledge can be usefully brought together.