ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the question of how a legal file is read. He addresses one of the unavoidable activities of any practice of the legal rule when examined in its ordinary accomplishment: reading. More specifically, the chapter deals with the reading of files. How do civil servants who are in charge of the assessment of a situation and of the characterization of the facts constitutive of it read documents contained in corresponding files? On the basis of several inquiries in the activities of agents of the Ministry of Agriculture in charge of defining farmers’ payment rights, the chapter examines unremarkable situations of bureaucrats’ reading of documents contained in files from the time of their first encounter with them. Beyond the issue of potentially diverse practices of reading, one can observe different conceptions of the rule and of public action. Administrative work should be studied “at work” from an ethnographic and anthropological angle. Two perspectives will be discussed. The first one uses the concept of “literacy” as proposed by Goody and discussed in literacy studies. The second one is in line with the teachings of sciences and technology studies, as inspired e.g. by Latour. The praxeological and pragmatic specificity of legal practices will be analysed from this double perspective and on the basis of contextualized empirical material.
