When Violence Is neither “Personal” nor “General”

Abstract

AbstractIn this essay, I use a case of testifying as an expert witness to argue that the anthropological focus on multicausality, context, and the social/cultural origins of persecution is useful and necessary in asylum cases. The government attorney argued that the persecutor's violence was “personal,” related only to his alcoholism, not the victim's identity as his wife. I argued that regardless of his personal history, the violence and the “excuses and justifications” that he used were patterned and based in cultural ideologies about gender. In a criminal case this might provide a “cultural defense” to avoid culpability. However, in asylum cases the social/cultural origins of violence help meet the legal criteria for asylum.