Abstract
Beatrice Jauregui’s Provisional Authority: Police, Order and Security in India is part of a recent surge in North American anthropological investigations into police and law enforcement. As such, these investigations can be seen as outgrowths of a longer genealogy of ethnographic studies of law, violence, and the state. Jauregui’s work is also heir to a set of debates over the nature of the state, violence, and authority in South Asian studies and South Asian academies; debates which have been constituted by the fields of postcolonial studies as well as more recent ethnographic scholarship. The scope and limits of Provisional Authority are best brought into focus when seen through the prism of these differing intellectual genealogies and how they treat the relationship of legitimate authority, monopolies over violence, and the nature of the state. For the reader, where they are placed vis-a-vis these intellectual genealogies will frame to what extent the book offers new perspectives and builds on existing scholarship.
Anthropologists in the North American academy have turned their attention to the study of police and policing in the light of media coverage of police brutality and the militarization of law and order under neo-liberalism more generally. In a field that has been dominated by criminologists and sociologists, anthropologists have been challenged to demonstrate how their interventions contribute to an appreciation of police beyond “the men in blue”; as a social institution, a set of practices, or as a mode of being. One approach has been to draw ethnographic attention to everyday relations of power and policing to show how police are not separate from, but embedded in the social contexts that they are called on to police. Jauregui’s focus on how “police authority as an everyday practice is recognized and valued as an amorphous and multidimensional social field” (p. 13) is an instance of this new direction in anthropologies of police/policing. Jauregui argues that it is necessary to turn away from what she identifies as “master narratives” (p. 12)—whether these stem from disciplinary traditions (political science, US criminology) or from our inheritance of particular thinkers (Weber, Foucault, Gramsci)—toward everyday contexts and practices of power, authority, and violence.
This is a much needed intervention for the US academy where students and general readers are primed to think of the police as an absolute and necessary power in the keeping of order. It takes careful historical, theoretical, and ethnographic work to unravel the idea that the “necessity” of police is linked to the emergence of modern capital, that order is not a preconceived good but tied to social, political, and cultural projects of dominance or hegemony, and that illegality, disorder, and criminality are not stable categories upon which police as agents of “the law” work neutrally. Critiquing the monopoly of force as the preserve of the modern state is the starting point of this education, and Jauregui’s characterization of police authority as “provisional” in the Indian context is a stark and welcome contrast to the picture of militarized police power in Europe and America. Using the North Indian colloquial term “jugaad” to develop a “context-derived analytical concept” (p. 38), Jauregui develops provisionality to focus on how the “quotidian police practices and expressions in contemporary northern India offer a lens into policing as a shifting field of resource exchanges and subjectivizing forces that may be simultaneously productive and stagnant, helpful and harmful, impotent and oppressive” (p. 32).
The power of this analytical concept could have been made to do more global conceptual work with respect to police; this is a missed opportunity in Jauregui’s book. For those in the South Asian academy, particularly in India, where her work will no doubt be read with great interest by academics and activists, the idea of police authority as provisional is by no means new. Indeed, some of her claims hardly bear repeating, such as when she argues that:
the theoretical framework constructed here for understanding and explaining police authority in contemporary India—a framework which may also apply in other times and places—departs from master narratives of power, sovereignty and the ordinary violence of law that have come to dominate contemporary scholarly and popular discourses about police.
Scholarship in and on South Asia on politics, power, violence, and its social contexts has been critical of and departs from “master narratives” offered by Weber, Foucault, and Gramsci for some time now; “jugaad” here does not offer much by way of theoretical novelty. From historical investigations into the role of the colonies in genealogies of modern police to sociological/anthropological studies of the role of gender and caste in constituting the ground of social norms and law and order, the state has never been privileged as a site from which authority flows. As for the ways in which monopolies over legitimate authority and violence are intertwined and embedded in the social fabric, kinship, caste, politics, and religious or communal violence have all constituted points from where scholars have shown just how contingent the state is in terms of force. Indeed, it can be said that “the police” has not been a separate category of study precisely because of the difficulties of separating its power and authority with that of caste, class, gender, and religious authorities from the colonial period onwards. Had Jauregui framed her analyses of provisional authority against this genealogy of power in South Asia, her ethnographic grounding of how it “as a foundation of governance and order is also vital to shaping states of insecurity among various subjects, and to configuring the authority of ‘the state’ as insecurity itself” (p. 153) could have been more incisive.
To sum up, Provisional Authority is an important ethnographic investigation into how police are embedded in a web of social and political relations, but is conceptually incomplete. When Jauregui writes that the state has been approached as “a peculiar kind of subject, its forces and relations somehow working externally from ‘society’ and its authority emanating from the will or power of ‘the sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’ howsoever conceived” (p. 157), she overlooks an immense body of work, much of it done by South Asian feminist scholars. For instance, Veena Das and Pratiksha Baxi have explicitly explored the limitations of seeing the state as a sovereign source of law, when it is more often complicit with, if not perhaps even subordinate to, the patriarchal family and community notions of honor in the policing of women’s bodies and sexualities. This work has shed considerable light on policing as social practice, where surveillance, suspicion, detection, deception, corruption, and compromise compete to shape authority as a pliable social resource. Jauregui’s focus on police authority as “inherently unstable as both a commodity of exchange and a relational force” (p. 156) adds a much needed level of nuance to this literature, because she does seek to pick out police as an object of study from a messy ethnographic reality. But without sustained engagement with existing literature on how authority is distributed across social and political fields, the broader conceptual claims that Jauregui intends for police work as provisional authority appear unsatisfactory.