Restoring Legality: Performativity, Transparency and the Crafting of a New Institutionality.

LETICIA BARRERA

San Francisco, California

Congreso; American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting; 2008

American Anthropological Associatioin

In Argentina, debates about judicial reform intensified during the 2001-2 crisis; criticism of courts’ workings focused on caseload, inefficiency, and lack of transparency. In response to these critiques, new practices that build upon a rhetoric of change, accessibility and openness to public scrutiny were enacted in the last years at the Supreme Court level. In parallel with these practices, the façade of Court’s building was restored. In this paper, I draw on the form of the Court’s restoration to address the ongoing efforts to perform and create a new image of this tribunal and the judiciary in general. The juxtaposition of legal forms with other forms of culture is not a claim of a direct correlation or influence (Berman 1992); it is just an exercise of thinking about legal practices through the appropriateness of forms (Strathern 1999). Restoration, as a technology of architectural conservation, involves more complex decisions than repairing a piece of work, or re-establishing its original status or appearance; rather, it implies both aesthetic and ethical commitments and attitudes toward the object to be restored. Restoration may be destructive, conservative or eclectic (Meek 2007); a dilemma that is also indexical of my subjects’ different and even competing understandings about legal change: whereas legality is interpreted for some as to revive a previous status, for others it means to produce an ideal state that has not yet lived up in practice. In one sense, however, these approaches to law are consistent: they look at transparency as their instrument of restoration.