No longer merely “good to think”: The new anthropology of police as a mode of critical thought

Presciences of police: From the police image in theory to theorizing police

An often unremarked aspect of the texts that circulate under the moniker “critical theory” ¹ today is the degree to which their theoretical arguments rest upon an image of the police. Perhaps one of the most famous of these is Althusser’s policeman shouting “Hey, you there”, the lynchpin exemplar for his theory of interpellation in which individuals are complicit in their own subjugation through ideology (Althusser, 1971). But Althusser was neither the first to use the image of police in this way nor does his theoretical edifice rely the most upon its scaffolding. In his “Critique of violence” Benjamin (1986) evokes the violence of the policeman to outline the shadow of law’s excess; for Arendt, relations of pure policing mark the terrain for those cast out as stateless and, therefore, not fully human (Arendt and Canovan, 1998); Lacan’s (1991) seminar L’enverse de la psychoanalyse, written in the wake of the May 1968 uprisings, in which he first attempts to explore the relation of psychoanalysis to politics, famously features the image of a policeman confronted by a university protestor. These ideas have not remained isolated in individual texts, but have served as touchstones in larger debates concerning subjectivity, inequality, sovereignty, power, and text. Althusser and Lacan were themselves responding to a long conversation about the relationship between language, subjectivity, and social relations that extends back at least to Saussure, through Kojeve and onward to Foucault. Benjamin’s writing was, in part, written in response to theories of liberal governance through restraint such as Weber’s (1958) “Politics as a vocation”, and has served as inspiration for everyone from his contemporary Carl Schmitt to Agamben and his adherents today. We can find traces of Arendt’s vision for a fully human political life in the contemporary writings of Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Joan Scott, among others. For these theorists the point has not been to offer an empirical description of police practice, but to use police to work through other problems. In this sense police have been “good to think”.

This tradition of writing about police “to think” has been prominent in cultural anthropology as well. Although anthropological texts have rarely focused squarely on policing, police and related officials have long been recurrent figures in the ethnographic texts of cultural anthropologists, where they often served not as inconsequential bystanders but as a crucial analytic fulcrum for the text. For example, in Clifford Geertz’s (1973) famous essay on the Balinese cockfight it is a police raid that allows him to establish the “rapport” central to his vision of anthropology as a project of “reading over the shoulder” of non-western others; in Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961) uses an extended anecdote of his encounter with police to reflect on and propel his analysis of cultural difference and modernity; urban ethnographers from Ulf Hannerz (1969) to Phillipe Bourgois (1995) have used police as a kind of shorthand for mechanisms of socio-spatial distributions of power.

Despite their central role in producing anthropological theory, however, police have only rarely been recognized as anthropological subjects in their own right. For reasons that require more careful attention to thoroughly elucidate, ² until recently, it was anthropologists rarely elected not to focus squarely on the practitioners of crime control and punishment—police, security guards, prison employees, and so on—as their main research subjects. Even as anthropology’s center of gravity has shifted over the last 30 years toward a general appreciation of the importance of locating its investigations within political-economic structures, processes, and imaginations that operate on a global scale, anthropologists still typically focus on the targets of police (participants in informal economies; populations experiencing heavy or inequitable police surveillance; individuals with illicit or illegal statuses suffering police violence and injustice) or relatively disembodied logics of security rather than on police practitioners themselves. In order to understand the potential contributions of a newly refigured anthropology of police, this vexed relation requires some exploration.

Anthropology and the study of police ³

As a discipline, anthropology has a long and influential tradition of engaging questions of law and politics of comparative provenance, and sometimes intimate relationship, with cognate disciplines such as political science, legal studies, and criminology. For example, the work of 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan was important for the development of theoretical innovations by Marx, Darwin, and Freud (Moses, 2009) and the work of Bronislaw Manlinowski (1926) in the first quarter of the 20th century was essential for our understanding of informal control mechanisms across cultures. Other anthropologists have contributed to our fundamental understanding of the nature of law and political order and sovereignty (see Roberts, 1979). Although their work has had a more lasting effect within criminology—and, ultimately the study of criminality rather than police—both the “criminal anthropology” of Lombroso (Horn, 2003; Lombroso, 2006) and the anthropométrie judiciare of Alphonse Bertillon were attempted engagements with contemporary anthropological problems such as parsing the competing philosophical claims of free will and determinism, describing the nature of consciousness and its problematic hinge on the materiality of the body, and resolving the tension between newly observed social regularities and individual variation (Hacking, 1990; Kaluszynski, 2014; Rafter, 2008).

This relationship, between anthropology as the disciplined study of the “human thing” (i.e. as a program of inquiry into anthropos constituted by normalizing practices within a field of power/knowledge that shapes the methods, objects, and ethics of its own epistemology), and criminology as an inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, similarly situated within relations of power/knowledge, centered around a key problem—crime and its control—has in many ways continued to be a productive engagement. For example, one of the most vital branches of critical criminology over the last 20 years has been that of “cultural criminology” (Ferrell et al., 2008; Hayward and Young, 2004), which has self-consciously imported the insights of a postmodern and interpretive anthropology in an attempt to move beyond the reductionist and positivist biases it sees in much of contemporary criminology toward a verstehen (Ferrell, 1997) that can account more fully for acts of both crime and order (Young, 2011). In a parallel sense, anthropological endeavors into some of the traditional sites of criminology, especially prisons and other detention centers (Cunha, 2014; Drybread, 2014; Rhodes, 2001, 2004; Ticktin, 2011), have opened up new kinds of research projects—with different canonical references, different operational concepts, different kinds of questions, different assumptions, different affective dispositions, and different ethical obligations—in a whole array of related sites (Parnell and Kane, 2003; Penglase, 2009; Schneider and Schneider, 2008). For example, efforts to reframe traditional sites of anthropological analysis, such as colonialism (Parnell, 2003; Rizzo, 2013), nationalism (Siegel, 1998), and even magic (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2004; Comaroff, 2006; Jensen and Buur, 2004) in dialogue with crime have pushed the conceptual boundaries of both projects by drawing attention to the ways that “rationality”, modernity”, “crime”, and “the human” have and continue to operate in a variety of contexts—oftentimes in ways that defy the expectations of more positivistic social science.

However the study of police has always occupied a challenging place within the broader discipline of anthropology (Fassin, 2006; Jauregui, 2013). One such challenge, which remains strangely persistent in the discipline despite its thorough critique, is the discipline’s own sense that its “core” should adhere to a focus on exotic colonial subjects (Baker, 1998; Trouillot, 1991). In part, this is the legacy of a disciplinary d’etente with sociology (and other fields of inquiry) which directed anthropology away from the study of urban (Hannerz, 1980), modern (Fabian, 2014; Rabinow, 1989), and western (Nader, 1989) contexts. In other part, it is the result of a long-standing evasion of issues of power and inequality (Asad, 1973; Rosaldo, 1993), that was then, subsequently, largely in reaction to this evasion, redirected to almost exclusive focus on the various forms of suffering experienced by less powerful, abject, and marginalized people (Robbins, 2013). This combination of factors has created a sort of anthropological lacuna for the study of police: as, on the one hand, an institution associated, especially by early anthropologists, with the West and processes of modernization, descriptions of police were relegated to the margins in favor of the more “traditional” elements of culture. On the other hand, as relatively powerful actors, anthropologists who have been concerned with addressing issues of power and inequality have tended to consider nuanced engagements with police to be a less critical task than capturing and giving voice to the perspectives of more marginalized populations, despite rather widespread calls to “study up” (Nader, 1972). This combination of factors has resulted in a paucity of anthropological engagements with police, per se.

Perhaps paradoxically, however, even while such disciplinary dispositions have deeply structured anthropological research projects and relations in the field, they have not erased the image of police, or the fact of policing, from its narratives. Instead, images of police have occupied structurally central roles in anthropological texts and, consequently, served to develop a specific relation vis-a-vis police that has deeply shaped the professional, political, and ethical senses of anthropology’s disciplinary self. Using the classic example of Clifford Geertz’s (1973) description of the Balinese cockfight, I have described this anthropological engagement with police as “polemic” and contrasted it with the more recognized relation of “rapport”. ⁴ For example, Geertz describes a frustrating inability to establish genuine relationships with the people in his field site initially, until the occurrence of a police raid in the village allows for the creation of a certain camaraderie. This is the point at which he is able to demonstrate his vision of anthropology as a project of reading cultural texts “over the shoulders” of our subjects, but it is also remarkable that this same event both introduces the police as a figure outside the anthropological project and one upon which it hinges. Police act as the methodological pivot through which “real” ethnographic relations can be established; a move which casts them as paradoxically both outside this relationship and crucial to it (Karpiak, 2010).

While this disciplinary configuration has been productive in many ways—for example, in documenting the profound effects of discriminatory policing on minority communities (Bourgois, 1995), offering examples of resistance to oppressive political domination (Burton, 2015; Cox, 2015; Scott, 1990; Williams, 2015), or highlighting the profound creativity of marginalized individuals and communities in the face of such (Ralph, 2014)—it has also produced a broader lacuna in the anthropological canon; the face of policing itself remains largely overlooked.

A “new” anthropology of police?

This approach to policing in anthropology contrasts markedly with the more sociological studies of police already firmly placed within the criminological tradition. “Classic” studies of police, many of them ethnographic in nature, such as Bayley (1990), Bittner (1970), Manning and Van Maanen (1978), and Skolnick (1966), used careful empirical observations of actual police practice in order to generate profound insights about the practical application of law and urban order, the structural limitations of bureaucratic forms of justice, the cognitive and semiotic predispositions of police officers, and the moral stakes at play in even minor police–citizen interactions. These insights have been expanded upon, reworked, and developed by police scholars in the cultural, comparative and critical criminological traditions in ways that continue to offer important insights into the nature of policing, police officers, and criminal justice systems around the world.

What, then, can a “Johnny-come-lately” discipline such as anthropology hope to add to the discussion? Perhaps, at one point, something like “ethnographic methods” or “participant-observation rooted in field experience” or “cross-cultural and comparative perspectives” might have offered a straightforward answer to that question (Karpiak and Garriott, forthcoming). However the centrality of those methods and normativity of those perspectives have undergone a thorough critique in anthropology (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997), even as they have become more predominant in other disciplines (Holmes and Marcus, 2006), including criminology, thus erasing anthropology’s “taken-for-granted, pretheoretical notions of what it is to do anthropology (and to be an anthropologist)” (Stocking, 1992: 282).

Still, the authors in this special section hold that there is something important to attend to in the emergence in recent years of a specifically anthropological study of police, alongside of, but not precisely reducible to, the classically “sociological” tradition. What that “something” is, however, remains an open question for exploration and depends largely on what each author means by “anthropological” as well as “critique”. ⁵ Put another way, this special section asks: if police have been such a productive tool through which to think, how does the emergence of anthropological research projects focused squarely on such practitioners stand to change that thought? This collection of articles will attempt to address that question through ethnographic accounts in which the limits and alternative possibilities of key concepts (the State, law, ethics, corruption, surveillance, oversight, discretion, public/private, culture, and violence) as well as the work of theorists (Althusser, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Dewey, Weber, and Aristotle) are interrogated through attention to the daily practices of policing, from Niger to Israel, Taiwan to Jamaica, and Kenya to Seattle. In the process these articles will push us to reexamine the practices of policing at the heart of collective life in such a way that challenges not only our understanding of such critical theorists and their work, but also the sense of “justice”, “morality”, “violence”, and the conceptual framework upon which such formulations traditionally rely.

For example, Diphoorn and Grassiani’s article (20(4) 430–445) engages with the many attempts to theorize the uneven landscape of contemporary policing, whether it be as “plural policing” (Jones and Newburn, 2006), “security quilts” (Ericson, 1994), “policing webs” (Brodeur, 2010), “nodes” (Shearing and Wood, 2003), “security networks” (Dupont, 2004), or “security assemblages” (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2010). While taking those projects seriously, as well as Loader and Walker’s (2006) insistence that the State remain an important actor even within these frames, Diphoorn and Grassiani build on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu et al., 1994) in order to develop their concept of “securitizing capital”. This concept, they argue, allows them to move beyond the debates in pluralized policing not by disregarding them but by insisting that no “pluralized” theory of police has such explanatory power as to eliminate the need for grounded fieldwork, which can attend to the various and unpredictable ways in which different forms of capital are mobilized so as to give shape to particular security fields; a fact they illustrate through fieldwork in Kenya, Israel, and Jamaica.

Starting from a similarly grounded perspective, Mirco Göpfert’s article (20(4) 446–461) offers a rejoinder to legal formalists who argue that justice emits from the application of the law. Building up from his experiences with gendarme in Niger who often not only regularly commit what such legal scholars would call “corruption”—in that their actions and decisions are frequently entirely extra-legal—but defend their actions in terms of social justice, Göpfert argues that their police work should be understood as instances of “repairing the law”. Drawing on such diverse thinkers as Aristotle and Gluckman (1967), Göpfert uses a detailed ethnographic description of how decisions about police action are made in order to illustrate the dual sense of “repair”: police works both as a means to “fix” the law, but also to re-align it with the demands and expectations of a post-colonial citizenry that oftentimes find the unchanged colonial-era legal codes irrelevant to their daily lives. If taken seriously, Göpfert’s argument offers a serious challenge to much of contemporary scholarship on police corruption and discretion, both in the post-colonial world and the West. Eliciting such a “change in perspective”, however, is, for Göpfert, central to the role a critical anthropology of police can play in the wider field of police studies.

Changing perspective is also the focus of Stalcup and Hahn’s critique (20(4) 482–501) as well, even as they offer a greater attention to how such ethical positions are formed in the first place. Dissatisfied with the narrow range of political-ethical positions available vis-a-vis police use of body cameras and the emergence of a wider social media “sousveillance” (Mann et al., 2002)—what they call either “techno-optimistic” or “techno-pessimistic” positions—Stalcup and Hahn draw on the work of US pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1957) as well as post-Foucauldian scholarship (Foucault, 1997) in order to contribute simultaneously to an anthropology of police and an anthropology of ethics (Faubion, 2011). Using examples from their own fieldwork in order to illustrate the various, and often contradictory, use of mediated images in police training, Stalcup and Hahn argue that in order to attend to the “co-production of techno-subjectivities”—the ways in which new technologies give rise to an underdetermined ethical space in which individuals are turned into subjects precisely by the demand to act in that opening—scholars must approach the topic from a “third position” that is open to both the dangers and productive possibilities of the ethical situation.

The stepping outside of grounded political commitments, so central to anthropological tropes of estrangement in fieldwork, also frames Jeffery Martin’s contribution (20(4) 462–481). Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in a variety of sites in Taiwan, Martin challenges the common-sense understanding in police studies—from Bittner to Brodeur—that policing is best understood as a mechanism for the allocation of violence, either originating from the State or elsewhere. Such perspectives, he argues, overlook the various systemic (read: cultural) meanings that might be attributed to police. Martin focuses on how police calls are made—their various forms, actors, technologies, situations, and motivations—in order to illustrate how the very meaning of police can vary. This insight offers deep implications for how we understand the role of policing in democratic (and partially democratic) systems, for example in how we understand the role of bureaucratic restrain and oversight, or the role of professional and impersonal conduct.

Beyond these contributions, this special section includes a series of book reviews—some written by anthropologists of policing others by non-anthropologists about anthropological texts—and a special reflection from eminent scholar of policing Peter K Manning, whose contribution to the field of police studies is much more well-known than his surprisingly fruitful relationship to the discipline of anthropology. Taken together, each of these pieces helps to outline the stakes and potential contributions of an anthropology of police, newly conceived. It is our hope that, more than just a corrective to models of social action and meaning, such explorations hold the potential to place a critical police studies at the center of our understanding of what it means to be human today.