Facts and Evidence

Bahceci, Sergen and Núñez, Jorge and Sharma, Sarbani and Suarez, Maka (2021) Facts and Evidence. Allegra Lab.

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Abstract

This short essay is an invitation to question how different forms of political engagement destabilize institutional processes of evidence making. In the workshop that motivated this collective reflection, we discussed the struggles that ethnographers undergo in finding a language to speak about “facts” and “evidence” in fieldwork sites from Palestine to Kashmir, from Scotland to Cyprus, from Lebanon to Ecuador, from Italy to Chile, and many more. What emerged from these conversations was a focus on how ethnographic and historical understandings of “truth” challenge legal and scientific claims, and why these competing truths are paramount for any politically engaged anthropology of evidence. Our focus here, then, is on evidentiary regimes illuminated through ethnographic collaborations around disappearance, dispossession, and massacre. We offer a conversation about how “facts” and “evidence” are deployed and contested on the ground. This approach, we hope, can help illuminate the relationship between justice, power, and knowledge that goes beyond instrumental theorizations of violence. To do so we present a reflection each on: ways of speaking truth to power in courts; everyday forms of evidence contestation; and counter-evidence production with statistics and data visualizations. In doing so, our aim is to break open the categories of fact and evidence by paying attention to stories often overlooked from processes of evidentiary production.

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Article

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Bahceci, Sergen and Núñez, Jorge and Sharma, Sarbani and Suarez, Maka

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