Schrödinger's Cat and the Ethnography of Law

Drawing on research regarding undocumented immigration and transnational adop tion, this essay argues that legal and ethnographic accounts retroactively instantiate potential realities that were there all along but are only made visible by official recog nition. In this sense, the "field " that is at the center of ethnographic inquiry is brought into being by the activities of the ethnographer, just as the field of (un)documented bodies is brought into being by a judicial decree. At the same time, such authoriza tions of the real are haunted by the noise that is left behind. This noise makes itself known by its pull on official representations, pointing to the instability of our objects of study, the multidimensionality of everyday life, and the gaps and disjunctions that compel us to return to what was overlooked in order to make our ethnographies real.

of the locations, because each of the histories-contributes to what we no Thus, until the box is opened, the phot the cat in a state of alive-deadness that, single photon path, and into life or dea dead cat, the multiple simultaneous path absurd.
This quantum physics problem of the r the much more contingent (and multipl also characterizes both law and ethnogr judge awards political asylum to an immig in the past officially resolve themselves of a more ambiguous reality is the opp determination that an individual deser affirm that the individual was already persecution). Prior to the judge's ruling, was in contention and, in fact, had the would not have been officially deemed p grants an adoption decree to parents in t experienced in the past as "giving birth" r Thus, when Jan Waldron, a woman who 1969, contacted the town hall 23 years l she was told that there was no record of explained the clerk of the court, the birt parents were her parents, y'know, the 1995:193). At the hospital where her dau infant's birth, but no cross-reference w "had been bom, yes, but there was no ev existence" (1995:194). Giving birth turn legally measured, may or may not have and not occurred).2 Ethnographies, too, select a particular p are somewhat fortuitous potentialities. order to answer research questions that simultaneously must remain open to po before they "entered" the "field," and th "occurred" prior to the ethnography b the possibility that the field may be re shape poses a conundrum not unlike that reconcile probability and outcome, or th and history. Ethnographers must reconcil ethnographers' own (re)constructions of Marilyn Strathem (1999:5) Yngvesson 2000Yngvesson , 2002Yngvesson , 2003Yngvesson , 2007. Putt conversation with each other, of course,

Lost in Translation
One of the unpredictable aspects of fieldwork is juxtaposition, that is, the partic ularities of the "collection" of which the "data" for a given project is comprised.
The present essay is based on just such an unpredictable juxtaposition. It grew out of two prior collaborations in which we placed seemingly disparate phenomena to gether in order to translate between them. This mode of collaboration differs from comparison, in which similarities and differences between phenomena, cases, or sit uations are identified in order to decipher the broader processes that are producing these similarities and differences, and, in some instances, to predict or shape future outcomes.4 For instance, in order to determine which types of proceedings are most effective in institutionalizing democratic practices, one might compare the tribunals and truth commissions employed in countries that have attempted to transition out of a period of authoritarian rule. Such comparisons assume that similarities and differences are already part of the phenomena being compared, and that these char acteristics are evidence of the processes that produced them and that they in turn will shape.
In contrast, our collaboration emerged somewhat fortuitously, when, along with our colleague, Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology at University of California Irvine, we discovered that we could translate between our respective analyses of transnational adoption, unauthorized migration, and offshore finance. When we read the papers that we each had prepared for a session at the 1998 Law and Society Association meeting in Aspen, Colorado, we found that we could substitute different terms for sentences in each other's drafts, and that the sentences would still make sense.
Offshore transactions originate, precisely, 'offshore,' somewhe space imagined to lie outside of powerful sovereign states.
Transnational adoption originates, precisely, in a natural 'real, where else, a space imagined to lie outside of law.
Unauthorized migration occurs, precisely, 'underground,' som else, a space imagined to lie outside of powerful sovereign terri This realization led us to write a joint article (Coutin et al. 2002), in wrote not only our own, but also each other's data. We were able because we were very familiar with each other's work, and because w the phenomena that we had not studied through those with which familiar. In other words, we proceeded less through comparison than and translation.
Similarly, the two of us subsequently wrote an article analyzing "r transnational adoptees make to their birth countries, and deportati vadoran immigrants are forcibly returned to their country of citize In the above passage from Advocacy after Bhopal, Kim Fortun describes how con ducting an ethnography of the Bhopal disaster threw conventional understandings of instrumental data collection into disarray. "My work in Bhopal was shaped by both too much and too little information Focused inquiry was deferred, and I simply accepted the barrage of data that characterizes disaster at the grassroots" (2001:348).
Fortun's comments call attention to ways that, in addition to being an instrumen tal process, fieldwork can be passive, a suspension of agency (Miyazaki 2000), in which ethnographers allow themselves to become caught up in the phenomena that they are analyzing. We are not advocating the approach taken by grounded theo rists, who attempt to collect data without preconceptions regarding what the data may show (Emerson 2001). In such approaches, the researcher is free to follow the data in any direction that seems promising-theory is constructed from the ground up. In contrast, we are not suggesting that ethnographers dispense with instrumental data collection in favor of passively following the data. We suspect that, even when ethnographers intend to proceed noninstrumentally, their research is guided by their own perceptions of significance. Further, scholars embark on particular studies for particular reasons.
Rather than advocating particular approaches to gathering data, our purpose here is to theorize the relationship between ethnographic accounts and the necessarily somewhat contingent process of "data collection." Although most noticeable in ex treme situations, such as those encountered by Fortun, this dimension of fieldwork is central to the ethnographic project. A "barrage of data" entangles ethnographers, drawing ethnographers into a field while simultaneously permitting ethnographers to anticipate a subsequent moment in which an ethnographic account will be produced.
Strathern (1999:1) describes this process as "immersement". Ethnographic practice, she writes, has a "double location"-in the "field" and "at the desk It is a moment of immersement that is simultaneously total and partial." Moreover, these two loca tions are interpenetrating. As Strathern notes, "Each [field] is an order of engagement which partly inhabits or touches upon but does not encompass the other The fieldworker has to manage and thus inhabit both fields at the same time" (1999:2).
Ethnography moves between worlds that inhabit each other.
Strathern describes this process of moving between worlds as "the conundrum posed by fieldwork," which seems to require that we "work... backwards with our archae ologies": that is, the data collected by the fieldworker "must encompass enough to include material which cannot be seen at the time, let alone be specified in advance,  (Latour 1999:69).

Juxtaposition and Collection
Bringing together roots trips and depo collection: the initial period of data colle a second process in which roots trips w a new collection, of sorts. In the secon "problem" of comparison: as we thought r and vice versa, what we had imagined t in a birth country or in an adopted cou connection to the other. "Deportation" bec and the roots trips that followed. "Adop deportation, emphasizing deportation's s a deportation is a kind of shadow other both their inseparability and why they "deportation" proved to be unstable obje data in a "field" where one's hosts mig comparative project pulled us to discover would have overlooked, had we not "im data and been forced to struggle with th took shape (in relation to one another) in Examining each of these processes vi for our interpretation of what roots tr our understanding of the implications o of liberal law: the "natural" child, the and citizens can be alienated through a and citizenship are potentially ephemer by adoptions and emigrations, which r (much as, upon measurement, a photon lar path). Note, however, that this anal in which it is the "natural" child and the "native-born" citizen that anchor the "as if' worlds of adopted children and naturalized citizens. As Benjamin notes, "Translation, ironically, transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic real" (1968:75).
An example of such reversibility, and of the complex ways that adoption and depor tation shadow one another, is provided by the following excerpt from an interview with Greg, a man who was adopted to the United States from El Salvador as a child and was subsequently deported to El Salvador because of a criminal conviction. Deportation from the United States reconnected Greg to a de facto legal self that had been rendered immaterial through his adoption to the United States almost two decades previously. Adoption, in turn, created a self and life in the United States that were forbidden to him, and that haunted him in El Salvador. The disjuncture between these "immaterial corporalities" (Zizek 1989:18) created first by adoption and then by deportation contributed to Greg's sense of alienage in his native land and his longing for return to the United States, his adopted country, where deportation had configured him as legally an alien.
Greg's experience as adopted and then point of origin or of any journey "back" the legal subject-that is, to define (and availability of a "back". But it also sugg may confound the definitions of belong by law. As doubly deported, Greg may time, the "back" for which he longs and is not simply an effect of law's exclusio the person known as "Greg") in the "in (Latour 1999:64)  Greg's experience returns us to the par legal birth of a child by so-called "natu such parents in order to anchor the law in neither "here" nor "there," but in an el the law; see Coutin et al. 2002). In Greg' should be no "back" because, officially, of his deportation story and the relocati by adoption law (his family in the Unit suggesting that any "back" or origin is an Another example of law's power to situate and resituate the legal subject, and of how an excluded "back" may pull this subject across time into a present that has been there all along, is provided by Deann Borshay Liem's autoethnographic film, First Person Plural (2000). The film describes what is in effect a deportation of an 8-year-old Korean child, Kang Ok Jin, whose mother had placed her in an orphanage near her home during a period when she was unable to provide for all four of her Korean family (and specifically to her Korean mother) is not "simply" a matter of law. The adoption decree transformed the existential reality of her relationship with the person she imagined to be her "mother" into a relationship with her not-mother, and Liem's film documents the materialization of this alternate reality: only when she realizes that her Korean mother is no longer her mother is she able to "return" to a relationship with her as not-a-daughter that (unbeknownst to her) had existed all along.
First Person Plural illuminates the ways that legal judgments enframe (Heidegger 1993) (Liem) who is at the center of the tale, as she attempts to sort out the "noise" (the emotional tensions with her adoptive parents, her conviction that "something was wrong") from the "information" she was provided (the adoption record that legitimized her identity as Cha Jung Hee).

Analogic Thinking
In 1988, as part of my fieldwork am workers who were providing "sanctua refugees, I volunteered with TECLA, Legal Assistance. One day, while searc support an asylum claim, I described m a Central American paralegal. "Do yo a refugee?" the volunteer asked th "People used to look at me and say, Y people and you walk just like white p (Ethnographic note, Su Noting that "sometimes it is assumed t know 'more' than those he or she work practicing fieldworkers would make suc as a matter of "knowing differently," bot point: that "the anthropologist is equall Being "in the middle" situates the anthr of truth. Ethnographic truth no more r mind with an object" th of reference in a senten (Latour 1999:69 "We used to think so," I said, "but really we should use larger boxes." He gazed about him in mute bewilderment, and did not flinch even when the roof of the house was lifted off just like the lid of a box, letting in the unconscionable, inordinate light of the stars. He had just time to breathe, "Oh, wow!" [Le Guin 1982:48-49] Notes 4. For a critique of the politics of comparison, see Staler (2004).
He collected books, including books on topics in which he had no interest. "These books, like many others among his treasures, literally were not good for anything, serving neither to divert nor to instruct" (Arendt 1968:42). He also collected quotations, and dreamed of "producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text" (Arendt 1968:47).
6. Latour (1999:310-311) describes this process (borrowing a term from semiotics) as "shifting (in, out, down)." As a result of this, an "internal" referent, or depth of vision (here, now, I; there, then, he or she) is constituted. This "internal" realm, as Simmel noted almost a century ago, is neither subjective nor objective but arises from "the practical relation between man and his object," a relation that combines both proximity (desire) and distance (value) (1990:77; and see Appadurai 1986:3-6) for its realization.
7. As Bourdieu (1987:233-234) notes, The judgment [of a court] represents the quintessential form of au thorized, public, official speech which is spoken in the name of and to everyone. These performative utterances, substantive-as opposed to procedural-decisions publicly formulated by authorized agents acting on behalf of the collectivity, are magical acts which succeed because they have the power to make themselves universally recog nized. They thus succeed in creating a situation in which no one can refuse or ignore the point of view, the vision, which they impose It would not be excessive to say that [law] creates the social world, but only if we remember that it is this world which first creates the law.
8. This recalls the discussion in Callon et al. (2002:199) of the process of qualification in which "goods" are produced and stabilized.