ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out author's transition, mediated by Sri Lanka and India, from lecturer in physical chemistry to lecturer in social anthropology. To development consultant for the Department for International Development, and expert witness in the British asylum courts. The chapter explores this 'genre-hopping', and the problems to which it may give rise. It starts by considering the structures of research papers in the experimental sciences, as paradigms of the kinds of writing analysed by Latour and Wolgan. The parameters of variation thus identified are then used to help characterise the writing of expert witness reports, far recent, fledgling genre. However, although UK-based anthropologists probably have basic awareness of the principles of British law, they are unlikely to have had much practical experience of it. The most straightforward problem is that poorly advised anthropological experts may unwittingly overstep the mark by purporting to offer opinions on matters which the law reserves for the judiciary alone, not for witnesses, however expert.
