US Anthropologists in the courtroom in the 1950s and 1960s

What is it about?

Many anthropologists believe that legal thinking and anthropologicial thinking are so different that anthropologists engaging in court proceedings have grave problems. If one goes back in the history of the discipline though, US anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s was highly engaged in court stuggles regarding indigenous land rights and racial segregation. The article analyses this history and shows that the "epistemologicial divide" between law and anthropology was not yet present and its appearance in anthropological theory has more to do with inner-anthropological debates than with the legal sphere.

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