Imaginaries of Judicial Practices in Cali, Colombia

Abstract

This article explores the emotions of users and functionaries involved in the justice system and the administration of justice in Cali, Colombia. The analysis presented argues that the state not only employs a bureaucratic rational language but also invokes emotions and feelings. In this sense, it is not only the central imaginaries of the state justice system and judicial processes but also the idea of justice itself that is marked by tediousness, delay and chaos, imaginaries of the system that were identified by the users and the officials involved in the administration of the system. There is no justice if it is not a process that is tedious, marked by ritual, mysticism, disorder and difficulties. These findings demonstrate that, against liberal discourses that emphasize the order, unity and rationality of public actions, that the power of the state actually operates through the disaggregated, the irrational and the emotional, a much wider and inexplicable framework.

Keywords

• judicial practices
• Anthropology
• ethnography
• state
• administration of the justice system
• judicial reform