Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology

Abstract Social anthropologists have acted as expert witnesses in legal proceedings for many decades, however there has persisted a tension between social anthropologists’ readiness to accept the assignation of ‘expertise’, and the typical manner in which courts and legally empowered bodies characterise such expertise as the forensic specialization of an established scientific field. This paper presents a model for the distinction between forensic social anthropology and expert social anthropology, both of which play important probative roles in a range of legal processes. The key variable in this proposed distinction is the relative degree of independent causal modelling permitted to social anthropologists engaged by courts and other legally empowered bodies. In forensic applications, social anthropologists are called upon to independently detect and explain causal processes that link culturally specific ideas to real-world instances human social interaction. By contrast, in expert applications, social anthropologists are called upon to advise on whether causal models defined by the terms of a given legal process have been substantiated. This distinction brings forensic and expert social anthropology into line with similar distinctions made between forensic and expert applications of physical anthropology in legal proceedings, and offers a useful contribution to the reconciliation of social and physical anthropology as two fields of a single parent discipline.