On Campus Condorcet, Bâtiment de recherche Sud, 5 cours des Humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers
Meeting room 5111 on the 5th floor
Anthropologie de l’expertise médico-légale en Inde du Nord
Abstract
While many studies address the role of forensic expertise in judicial deliberations, few of them focus on the way medicine and law are interliked in experts’ daily lives. Yet testifying in court is only one aspect of a forensic doctor’s activities. To understand how these experts make use of the interface between medicine and law therefore means moving away from the courtroom to focus on the daily practice of expertise in hospitals. From this perspective, my thesis is based on a one-year ethnographic survey I conducted in three hospital mortuaries in North India, as well as on work that relied on court records. The case studies used are based on an analysis of interactions between doctors and police officers or family members, of the time required to examine corpses and of the strategies used when writing forensic reports. While placing Indian forensic medicine in its historical, sociological and institutional context, this work – at the intersection between medical anthropology and legal anthropology – aims to establish how forensic doctors understand forensic cases, and how they write up their reports and act upon facts.