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Legality Against Orality

Recent work on political liberalism attempts to find ways to bring divergent cultural practices under a single rubric. This article examines one of the limits of the cultural commensurability of modern liberal legality. It argues that Western forms of evidentiary proof are not amenable to oral history testimony given by indigenous litigants. Current anthropological research on oral history and indigenous culture shows that oral history is not simply a “record” or “chronology” of events, but is a particular cultural practice that draws its members into the fold – and this is an event of its own. Western forms of evidence, however, traditionally treat testimony as “reporting” or as “creating a record” of a prior set of events in time. This article suggests that the distance between these two conceptions of “events” and “record” is significant enough to warrant rethinking the place of traditional trial practices in the treatment of oral history. It also suggests that the Western form of legality is grounded in an understanding of temporality that eschews any other way of thinking about events and their occurrence, a legality oriented against orality.