Ten years ago Ilana Gershon analyzed how the concept of culture travels through different institutions, and how people are made cultural in courts versus in legislatures, in a seminal Critical Review Essay published in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropological Review (2011). In this reflection, written as part of an emergent conversation Revisiting and Revitalizing Ethnographies of Legislatures edited by Neil Nory Kaplan-Kelly, Emma Crewe asks why so few anthropologists have ventured into parliaments, who are the exceptions and what have they found when they take the plunge.
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Researchers interviewing politicians in Mon state, Myanmar