Double Vision

In important, increasingly visible ways anthropologists are acting as experts in legal cases. Anthropologists have served as consultants and expert witnesses in Native American land claims disputes, cultural rights and religious freedom cases,1 political asylum cases (Loucky and Alvarez, this volume), civil rights and desegregation cases,2 First Amendment and ethnic rights cases,3 criminal trials raising cultural issues,4 and cultural preservation,5 government benefits,6 and environmental matters. Anthropologists have testified both on the basis of long-term field experience with cultures and communities and about research specifically conducted for the purposes of ongoing litigation. With burgeoning cultural pluralism and ever-sharpening economic disparities in the United States, anthropological expert testimony is emerging from the chrysalis of issue-oriented litigation about indigenous and minority peoples, where anthropological expertise is well recognized, into more commonplace family, commercial, and criminal cases. This volume is intended as a reflective yet practical guide for anthropologists working or thinking of working with lawyers and lawyers working or thinking of working with anthropologists. Two of the contributors, Randy Frances Kandel and Michael Davidson, are both anthropologists and attorneys; three, Peter Rigby, James Loucky, and Isabel Wright, are anthropologists who work closely with attorneys; and two, Peter Sevareid and Lynn Alvarez, are attorneys who work closely with anthropologists. Because the readers of NAPA Bulletins are primarily anthropologists, this volume takes somewhat of an anthropologist's eye view in rendering familiar the exotic culture of the law. But we believe attorneys may, with equal profit and pleasure, read it "in reverse" to gain insight into the exotic culture of the anthropologist.