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Anthropological and legal literatures often claim that the anthropology of law is a boundary discipline between social anthropology and legal studies. From this point of view, a sharp divide between law and culture is an indispensable prerequisite for any smooth interdisciplinary collaboration between social anthropologists and legal scholars as well as for combining ethnographic data with legal analyses. This paper, on the other hand, suggests that such joint efforts require a more sophisticated understanding of the mutual relationships between these disciplines and points to their entangled disciplinary beginnings. The social sciences, and social anthropology in particular, established their reflexive empirical methodologies and analytical systems by continually transcending the spatial and temporal boundaries of Western (legal) orthodoxy. Hence, the anthropology of law is seen as a distinctive scientific field, which views the law as an issue of the Other and whose definite theoretical and methodological attitudes are incompatible with both the ethnocentrism of conventional jurisprudence and the understanding of the Otherness in non-legal anthropology.

Until recently, legal ethnography has been understood as an integral part of legal anthropology and its studies of law in particular societies and cultures. In some older national traditions of European legal ethnology, including the Czech tradition, it has been considered a legal rather than a social science. Recent shifts in the perception of ethnography, which is increasingly understood as an autonomous methodology or a technology of knowledge production, are an opportunity to re-think the specific position of legal ethnography. This paper therefore explores the difference between ethnography as it is understood in the anthropology of law and the new relationship of “law and ethnography” as two autonomous variables. On the basis of several recent legal-ethnographic studies, it also seeks to identify the persistent common denominators of both approaches and attempts to show their possible contribution to the traditional methodology of legal research.

This article presents an analytical study of several asylum cases on which Czech courts issued rulings between 2007 and 2022. It focuses on exposing the ways in which asylum authorities/courts conceptually treat legal otherness on the basis of incomplete information in the practical context of asylum proceedings. It demonstrates how the judgments of Czech asylum courts deal with the legal differences of countries of origin in evidentiary interpretations of documents, such as transcripts of asylum interviews or country-of-origin information (COI), by reconstructing the conceptual frameworks in which the alterity of the origin countries' state legal systems and customary law is embedded. It identifies particular evidentiary concepts that help to ensure the sustainability of the formal categories of 'state' and 'legal system' despite their apparent incompatibilities with various unconventional legal actors that do not easily fit into the standard ontology of formal asylum law. In particular, Czech court rulings tend to conceptually frame unconventional legal authorities (like elders, traditional councils) as cultural entities, non-state actors, or private persons, which paradoxically disqualifies them from the ontological possibility of posing (or preventing) a threat to refugees by operating an (in)effective legal system. The article examines the implications of this way of framing the legal authorities and systems of other countries, focusing specifically on Afghanistan, Jordan, and Yemen, and discusses the possibility of applying an alternative of legal-anthropological conceptualisation of unconventional legal authorities.