ASYLUM INTERVIEWS IN THE UK 59 James Clifford’s seminal study Identity in Mashpee (Clifford 1988). In his courtroom ethnography, Clifford showed how difficult it was for the ‘Mashpee Indians’ to have their identity as ‘Indians’ recognised as they had neither ‘ancestral’ land nor their own language, religion or political structure to showcase. Clifford referred to the Mashpee as a ‘borderline case’ where the court dealing with their case did not reveal facts as much as conduct an experiment in translation between identity assertions and attributions. Back to the case at hand, the applicant, via his lawyer, later submitted a half-page typed document that he must have copied from somewhere or received from someone, which indicates that the ‘Rohingya language’ is called ‘Rohingyalish’ and was first written ‘back to 300 years and used Arabic Scripts’, but that currently the Latin alphabet is being used. In submitting this document at a later stage of his asylum procedure, he tried to respond to (and thus acknowledge) the repeated official demand for a particular kind of knowledge – in this case, the very existence of a language even though he himself did not speak it. The asylum interview is an encounter in which all parties are ‘other’ to one another. And, one could add, to a great extent they remain in this position even at the end of the interview. The shared interaction setting neither presupposes nor necessarily produces a shared horizon of knowledge, yet ‘evidence’ is nonetheless co-constructed. The linguistic anthropologists Sally Jacoby and Elinor Ochs define co-construction as ‘the joint creation of a form, interpretation, stance, action, activity, identity, institution, skill, ideology, emotion, or other culturally meaningful reality’ (1995: 171; emphasis removed), which does not necessarily presuppose or produce a bond or unity between the interaction partners. In legal anthropological and ethnomethodological literature, it has already been documented that asylum seekers are trying to answer in a way they think is expected from them (Campbell 2020; Dupret 2016; Good 2009). Likewise, the experiential knowledge of the caseworkers has been emphasised, drawing attention to the fact that asylum procedure involves both compliance with procedural rules and sometimes a wide margin of discretion on the part of caseworkers and judges (Affolter 2021; Kelly 2012). What has been less highlighted, however, is that in the asylum procedure not only is there no common knowledge background, but also the different knowledge backgrounds are asymmetrical to one another. Ronald Scollon refers to such forms of hierarchisation as ‘vertical constructions’ (Scollon 1976, cited in Jacoby and Ochs 1995: 172). While the person seeking asylum is in possession of secure knowledge about their personal history, even if it does not align with the categories called on in the interview, the caseworker is in possession of secure knowledge of the asylum procedure. However, state officials cannot dictate how their questions will be answered, and it often turns out that they have no way of evaluating the answers given by an interviewee, lacking contextual knowledge. While general law speaks of the ‘penumbra of doubt’ (Hart 1993: 12), which must be illuminated in order to achieve certainty and make ‘objective’ decisions, asylum procedure consists mainly of ‘shadows’ that make positivist jurisprudence difficult or even impossible (Dequen 2013: 453). Asylum interviews, especially in the case of stateless persons, are characterised from the outset by the fact that both parties in the interview lack secure knowledge about their respective counterparts. In addition to the lack of shared knowledge (factual on the one side; procedural on the other side), it is also not possible to refer