Cultural Expertise: An Emergent Concept and Evolving Practices

Abstract

This introduction provides a snapshot on cultural expertise as an emergent concept in the socio-legal studies and evolving practices in the formulation of rights and the resolution of conflicts in and out of court. It starts with the definition of cultural expertise and the need for an integrated and broad conceptualization that includes all the arrays of socio-legal instruments that use knowledge from the social sciences to assist decision-making authorities in the settlement of conflicts. It then mentions the wide span of fields of cultural expertise going from the recognition of the rights of autochthone minorities and the First Nations to the politics of cultural expertise in modern reformulations of customs, vis-à-vis gender rights, including the revisitation of socio-legal instruments such as the cultural test and the scrutiny of psychiatric evaluation in criminal trials. It concludes by offering short descriptions of the papers included in the Special Issue, which include judicial practices involving cultural experts and surveys of the most frequent fields of expert witnessing that are related to the culture. In addition, it interrogates who the experts are; how cultural expert witnessing has been received; how cultural expertise has developed across the sister disciplines; and finally, it asks whether academic truth and legal truth are commensurable.

Keywords

• socio-legal studies
• anthropology of law
• law and society
• multicultural societies
• cross-cultural dispute resolution
• cultural expertise
• cultural defense
• cultural test
• sweden
• italy
• sami
• first nations