Obscurity in the Micropolitics of English for Legal Purposes: Towards an Anthropological Framework

Abstract

Summary. Research in English for Legal Purposes (ELP) has expanded in the past30 years, in parallel with the increasing attractiveness of transnational legal education. The present paper aims at observing how ELP research has dealt with the issue of globalisation of law studies, considering that legal taxonomies remain largely national. The analysis expands on the application of Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (ASI) theory (Durand 1969) to a language policy context to describe the positioning of ELP researchers and law experts in relation to each other. Focusing on the notion of posture, an the analysis of images in a corpus of 68 ELP research papers suggests that the theme of obscurity lies at the heart of ELP research discourse. Power-related images fall into the four broad categories of animality, depression, the fall and the labyrinth. The contribution of ASI theory to the study of the micropolitics of ELP thus appears to be two-fold. ASI theory sheds light on the metadiscourse on power that runs through ELP research and that helps understand agents' positioning. ASI theory applied to ELP research eventually sheds light on the aporia (Glanert, 2005) Legal English researchers and law experts are faced with in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context.