The paths for selective circulation in the justice system

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.

New Orleans

Congreso; American Anthropological Association 109th Meeting; 2010

Within a program of research on the discursive construction of knowledge in an institutional context, this study focuses on the role of interactional routines in the circulation of a view of the past. This discourse-analytical and ethnographic approach to social practices relates the microanalysis of habitual interactions to institutional conceptions of knowledge. The data come from twenty-two criminal trials and consist in interactions between witnesses and trial lawyers. In that community, what is taken as known has been registered legitimately through a prescribed procedure. The information disclosure to be analyzed is linked to a backstage of previous procedures and information sources. The co-presence of judges and witnesses is an institutional value which underlies the principle that the source of the judge?s knowledge is the testimony in the current encounter. Hence, some of identified routines are meant to lead the witness to express selected content that is present in the case file. This revelation of apparently new information gets staged as an institutional ritual and is specifically addressed to the judge. There is a conventionalized reversal which consists in evaluating the witnesses? utterances in relation to a previous text for which they are held responsible: the deposition at the preparatory stage. That written text gets explicitly utilized as a more reliable source of information than the witness can be at that time.The results show that the function of this staged management of knowledge is to ratify institutional ideals about the quality of information while interactionally constructing what is officially known.