Anthropological reflections on restoring justice in Norway

In a recent analysis of a criminal case in Norway, I studied the performance of legal and medical professionals in the courtroom (Hydle 2001). One of my conclusions after this fieldwork is that there seems to be a troublesome and paradoxical problem of randomness in the legal narrative – in spite of the objective and whole-truth-and-fact approximation claimed by the legal (and medical) professionals, which is exacerbated by the hegemonic position of the presiding judges. I also suggested how African categories for magic and witchcraft might be useful analytical instruments for understanding Norwegian thinking (i.e. turning the colonial direction of the argument the other way round). Looking back at my fieldwork, it becomes clear that the professional actors belong to fields of knowledge from which there is no way of building bridges to each others’ understanding. To create ‘the other’, in the image of oneself or to create oneself in the image of ‘the other‘, both the fields of medicine and law are self-referential. Their ethos lies in the search for knowledge within the medico-judicial image of ‘fact’, ‘truth‘, ‘reality’ and ‘real‘. Such images are myths that exclude the images of belonging to ‘the other‘. An anthropological view of myths relates them to tales of a general and social, not individual, nature. The practical implications of my ethnography raise questions about criminal court practice and the contemporary Norwegian judiciary.