ABSTRACT
As scholars and teachers, governmental advisers, and agency bureaucrats, anthropologists play a number of different roles in American society. Each role entails certain intellectual and moral issues, but there are few roles that confront conscientious anthropologists with more serious scholarly and ethical problems than those posed by their appearance in legal proceedings as expert witnesses. This chapter focuses on expert witnesses drawn from the discipline, anthropology. In many cases, anthropologists have appeared on the side of only one of the parties in the case. Anthropologists are frequently called on to explain to a court of law certain aspects of the culture of those who have sought their help as expert witnesses. The cases, both civil and criminal, present problems of interpreting to the court the language and concepts of the party involved, and the relation between the legal issues posed and the relevance of anthropological findings.
