Troubled Communication: Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings in the Asylum-Hearing

Kälin, Walter

doi:10.4324/9781315092478-8

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Atkinson and Drew (1979) showed how the formal question and answer format of cross-examination constrains communication in all sorts of ways, and further questions arise regarding the impact upon spoken legal discourse of cases requiring the use of interpreters, as is particularly likely in contexts of legal pluralism. 4 It is well-established that when litigants and lawyers come from very different cultural backgrounds, all kinds of miscommunication may arise (Kalin 1986;Berk-Seligson 2002;Rycroft 2005), and exactly the same may be said of situations in which, thanks to the professionalisation of which Franz spoke (2002,49), participants who supposedly share a common culture display widely differing forms of 'legal consciousness'.…”

Section: Legal Pluralismmentioning

confidence: 94%

Folk models and the law

Good

2015

The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law

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This article considers the relationships between the disciplines of law and anthropology, as portrayed in the work and embodied in the life of Franz von Benda-Beckmann. Starting with an assessment of the BohannanÀGluckman debate over the relevance of Western legal categories for understanding nonWestern ('folk') legal systems, it shows how the work of von Benda-Beckmann transcends this dispute by concerning itself with the relations between such different legal systems, that is, with legal pluralism as that notion was gradually refined through the work of Franz himself and others. 'Western' legal systems and their distinctive modes of reasoning and understanding, too, are proper objects for anthropological analysis and concern, not only the 'folk' systems on which anthropologists initially focused. And as von Benda-Beckmann argued, the approaches in both contexts should be the same; above all, legal anthropologists must avoid the 'expertise-trap' of deferring to academic lawyers when it comes to understanding how formal state law works.

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Section: Legal Pluralismmentioning

confidence: 94%

Folk models and the law

Good

2015

The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law

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“…The main fault line seems to run between those with a legal background and those without, the latter usually having a social sciences or humanities background. As the asylum procedure involves writing legal orders, conducting interviews in complex intercultural settings (see Kälin 1986) and evaluating the credibility of asserted origin and persecution narratives, caseworkers often disagree on what 'just' decision-making means regarding these contrasting facets of their work. Thus, caseworkers quite often openly acknowledge taking a 'legalistic' approach or one that departs from it and express a clear preference for one way or the other.…”

Section: Communities Of Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking the ‘Just’ Decision: Caseworkers and Their Communities of Interpretation in the Swiss Asylum Office

Affolter

Miaz

Poertner

2018

Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

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Political and ethical issues are […] found at the heart of public debate on asylum, which oscillates between a preoccupation with the management of migratory flows and the principle of protection of victims of persecution' (Fassin and Kobelinsky 2012: 469). This leads to tensions and aporia with which decision-makers are confronted in their everyday work. Fassin and Kobelinsky (2012: 470) identify three such aporia. The first refers to the need to simultaneously enhance the 'greater good' of the institution, i.e. asylum protection, and, at the same time, to challenge asylum applications and put them in doubt. The second has to do with what they define as 'the core value' in decision-making, as it is perceived by decision-makers themselves: 'that of 13

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“…Following a brief description of the Danish legal context, we consider the trajectory the asylum motive takes before it reaches the RAB. Our task is not to look at the content of the asylum seekers' life stories as such (Kälin 1986;Blommaert 2001;Ghorashi 2008), but rather to look at the production of the asylum motive as a narrative tool to analyse the systems of judgement. Indeed, we argue that the asylum determination system profoundly shapes the asylum motives, while at the same time ascribing authorship of them solely to the asylum seeker.…”

Section: A Narrative Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrating Asylum in Camp and at Court

Danstrøm

Whyte

2018

Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

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In Denmark, as elsewhere, narratives are central to the asylum determination procedure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter investigates the ways in which asylum seekers and asylum lawyers present and re-present asylum narratives across two contrasting narrative contexts: Danish asylum centers (“camp” to asylum seekers) and the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (“court” to asylum seekers). Distinguishing between “asylum motive” and “asylum talk”, or stories for and stories of asylum, we argue that context strongly shapes the kinds of asylum narratives that are presented and shared, but also that these kinds of narratives influence each other. We show that uncertainty, credibility and authorship are central both in the Danish asylum process and for the ways in which it is understood by the actors invested in it.

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Troubled Communication: Cross-Cultural Misunderstandings in the Asylum-Hearing

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Folk models and the law

Folk models and the law

Taking the ‘Just’ Decision: Caseworkers and Their Communities of Interpretation in the Swiss Asylum Office

Narrating Asylum in Camp and at Court

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