Abstract
AbstractProviding expert testimony in asylum proceedings for mentally ill Mexicans, we are regularly asked to reduce individual subjects to diagnostic categories and an entire country to one of its most dysfunctional institutions. How, attorneys and judges ask us, does Mexican “culture”—through its institutions and psychiatric hospitals—treat the mentally ill? To adjudicators of asylum claims, there must be a clear and often singular “truth.” As Nikolas Rose has argued, however, “Truth is always enthroned in acts of violence.” This essay grapples with a question inherent to this work: to whom—and to what truths—are anthropological expert witnesses responsible?
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