Abstract
This introduction provides a snapshot on cultural expertise as an emergent concept in the socio-legal studies and evolving practices in the formulation of rights and the resolution of conflicts in and out of court. It starts with the definition of cultural expertise and the need for an integrated and broad conceptualization that includes all the arrays of socio-legal instruments that use knowledge from the social sciences to assist decision-making authorities in the settlement of conflicts. It then mentions the wide span of fields of cultural expertise going from the recognition of the rights of autochthone minorities and the First Nations to the politics of cultural expertise in modern reformulations of customs, vis-à-vis gender rights, including the revisitation of socio-legal instruments such as the cultural test and the scrutiny of psychiatric evaluation in criminal trials. It concludes by offering short descriptions of the papers included in the Special Issue, which include judicial practices involving cultural experts and surveys of the most frequent fields of expert witnessing that are related to the culture. In addition, it interrogates who the experts are; how cultural expert witnessing has been received; how cultural expertise has developed across the sister disciplines; and finally, it asks whether academic truth and legal truth are commensurable.
Highlights
This introduction provides a snapshot on cultural expertise as an emergent concept in the socio-legal studies and evolving practices in the formulation of rights and the resolution of conflicts in and out of court
Doubts and concerns exist regarding the usefulness and appropriateness of social sciences, and in particular anthropology, for dispute resolution; while on the other, existing conceptual tools do not allow an encompassing analysis of the use of socio–anthropological knowledge in the legal field, especially for what concerns the usefulness of social scientists as expert witnesses
A first definition of cultural expertise described it as “the special knowledge that enables socio-legal scholars, or, more generally speaking, cultural mediators—the so-called cultural brokers—to locate and describe relevant facts in light of the particular background of the claimants and litigants and for the use of the court” (Holden 2011). This definition is too restrictive today because it does not account for the broader range of out-of-court procedures in which the knowledge of the social sciences is applied to the resolution of conflicts, litigation, and the formulation of rights—the need for an integrated definition of cultural expertise that takes into account both in-court and out-of-court
Summary
This introduction provides a snapshot on cultural expertise as an emergent concept in the socio-legal studies and evolving practices in the formulation of rights and the resolution of conflicts in and out of court. In specialized fields of law, such as native land titles and First Nations’ rights in America and Australia, the appointment of social scientists as experts, especially anthropologists, dates back to the 19th century.
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