Suchergebnisse

This article employs linguistic anthropological methods to examine the debate over whether equal protection doctrine requires legal recognition of same-sex couples' marriages. It focuses on oral arguments at the Supreme Court of California in the seminal In re Marriage Cases (2008). I argue that the contested use of equal protection terminology simultaneously displays the cultural neutrality of liberal jurisprudence and harbors cultural ideologies about sexual orientation. During oral argument, this duality compressed into grammatical competition over a single shorthand term, equalit(y)(ies). Selecting the singular versus plural form reproduced counterbalanced arguments in favor of uniform equality through marriage or comparable equalities through domestic partnership status. But the ideologies hidden within the grammatical nuance also provided flexibility to overcome that inertia at particular moments.

Contemporary anthropological research needs innovations in its culture of ethnographic method, stimulated by encounters with subjects whose perspectives, curiosity, and intellectual ambitions parallel the ethnographer's own. They are often, but not always, subjects who are elites and experts. These encounters go beyond the data‐gathering or rapport‐promoting interview or conversation. In an anticipatory way, what is transacted shapes directly the evolving analytic frames and conceptual apparatus that figure in the results of research. We explore one such innovation: the staging of para‐sites as research events. An interaction with reflexive subjects orchestrated alongside ongoing fieldwork activities, the para‐site seeks a mutual shift in stance from researcher–subject to epistemic partnership. Its purpose is to risk interpretations together in a manner that disrupts both researcher's and subject's habitual analytic modes in order to access in situ the emergence of ideas. We report on the conduct of a para‐site experiment at the World Trade Organization.

Abstract
Contemporary anthropological research requires innovation in method that can take the measure of consequential reflection by many subjects on knowledge production within their own domains and anticipate how a research project might connect productively with various discursive communities and networks given the increasing complexity of ethnographic scale and context. One such innovation, the para-site, addresses these challenges by enlisting reflexive subjects as epistemic partners in orchestrated interactions situated alongside ongoing fieldwork activities. Our experiment set the para-site in the “Green Room” of the World Trade Organization and employed linguistic anthropology to facilitate exchanges at the level of our ethnography′s guiding concepts.