Abstract

Starting from the many unique difficulties any international protection procedure poses to all the subjects caught in it, in this essay I explore in particular the issue of (linguistic) translation and the concept of evidence as employed in the asylum procedure. Acknowledging how asylum oral narratives acquire meaning in relation to the specific forms of knowledge in which they are embedded, and drawing from selected researches on cross-disciplinary epistemological issues in linguistic and legal anthropology, I suggest that a more just evaluation of asylum narratives necessitates both a recognition of asylum seekers as epistemic subjects and the stretching of familiar concepts and categories in order to take into account the possibility to make space for different epistemologies.