EXPEDIENTES, PERSONAS Y AGENCIA

UNA MIRADA ETNOGRÁFICA SOBRE LAS PRÁCTICAS DE PRODUCCIÓN Y CIRCULACIÓN DEL SABER EN LA CORTE SUPREMA ARGENTINA

Abstract

There is a general assumption in Western legal cultures that the functioning of justice materializes in practices similar to those of a professional bureaucracy whose knowledge is based on a rational, objective basis, and therefore, with a claim to universality. Starting from this assumption, this article explores in an ethnographic way some material aspects of judicial practice, specifically, the creation and circulation of files, to analyze instances of the production of knowledge that the bureaucracy does not allow access to, and that result in a certain way , the blind spot of socio-legal studies, more concerned with investigating how judges decide or think, or the effects of the judicial decision. Paying attention to such a daily device of the judicial bureaucracy as the file, allows us to direct our gaze towards the forms of interventions of the actors that produce this type of document, figures that tend to be perceived and described as impersonal. and interchangeable in bureaucratic logic. And at the same time, also appreciate the different forms of agency that are activated or suspended in the bureaucratic circuit of the files. This dynamic, as will be argued, can be interpreted in the light of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's (1988) reflections on the forms of objectification and personification that occur in two "ethnographically conceived social spaces" (Pottage 2001): by a one hand, the Euro-American economy based on the trade of commodities, and on the other, the economy of Melanesia based on the exchange of gifts.