Follow the Actors: Ethnographic Keys for Understanding Legal Activism for Criminal Justice Reform in Argentina

Julieta Mira

doi:10.17561/tahrj.n13.4

Abstract

This article presents the research backroom about the legal activism in the criminal justice system reform following the ethnographic strategy. In particular, it addresses the “struggle” for “accusatory” criminal procedural reform at the federal level in Argentina since the end of the last dictatorship (1976-1983). Specifically it is about: a) participation in public events as an entrée to the field; b) native etnographer; c) native categories and theoretical concepts; d) the cause-based “partisanism” (militancia) and legal activism; and e) reform flags as cosmologies of social order. Finally, the article offers an analysis of the benefits of ethnographic research with legal activists in the field of human rights.

Highlights

THE RESEARCH OF THE LEGAL WORLD FROM INSIDEThis article presents the research backroom about lawyers and the criminal justice system reform following the ethnographic strategy typical of the anthropology
The research was able to detect the legal activism of a group of lawyers who positioned themselves as moral entrepreneurs in the dispute for the Criminal Justice reform, established networks of activism beyond Argentina, and dedicated their lives and careers to the cause of law
The “shamanic journeys are vertical journeys rather than horizontal as happens with the classic journey of the Homeric heroes”, because “somehow they set out to reach the bottom of the well of their own culture” (1974: 175). It is from this understanding that the opportunity of an inner journey opens for the researcher himself. All these elements show that eventhough it is not a trip to distant lands, like those undertaken by classical anthropologists, my fielwork required a journey to a world that was symbolically as exotic as it was close in terms of territory: the social world of lawyers committed to criminal justice reforms (Sabarrayrouse Oliveira, 2009)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This article presents the research backroom about lawyers and the criminal justice system reform following the ethnographic strategy typical of the anthropology. This article presents both the main methodological results of my fieldwork and an analysis of my own research practice in the world of criminal law and human rights, as a path generated in the search for understanding the object of my research: the reform of the Federal Criminal Procedural Code. This reform aimed at establishing the so-called “accusatorial” system in Argentina comprising the following features: orality, publicity, prosecutor protagonism and constitutional guarantees during the proceedings. This approach makes a turn, showing the adoption of interesting points of view within the activist universe of the lawyers beyond the technical issues of the reform

II.1. Participation in public events: an entrée to the field

II.2. Native etnographer

PRODUCING A COMPREHENSIVE PERSPECTIVE CONCERNING LAW FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

III.2. Reform flags as cosmologies of social order

CONCLUSIONS