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.
Researchers interviewing politicians in Mon state, Myanmar