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Abstract
This research note suggests that traditional ideals of virtue in Taiwan enable an order-making dynamic to operate in the backstage of state record-keeping processes. These virtues coordinate cooperation by policemen, civilians and politically empowered elites, simultaneously facilitating local order-maintenance and ensuring that police records serve the interests of the established political economic structure. I focus on the ways that this arrangement is grounded in the historical institution of the population registry, or hukou. I argue that Taiwan’s hukou has effectively translated ...
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Abstract
This article explores a “particularistic” concept of legitimacy important to Taiwanese democracy. This form of legitimacy, I suggest, has been instrumental for Taiwan's successful democratic consolidation in the absence of the rule of law. As evidence, I combine ethnographic observation of neighborhood police work with historical consideration of a type of political figure emergent in the process of democratic reform, which I call the “outlaw legislator.” I focus my analysis on the institutional and ideological processes articulating local policing into the ...
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Abstract
Less than two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is witnessing a range of policy interventions that almost iconoclastically challenge the premises of democratic governance. Police military ranks have been reintroduced and an exemplary postapartheid law governing the use of lethal force has also been amended in favor of police discretion. Simultaneously, however, community policing, a benchmark for democratic policing, is being rolled out on unprecedented scale. This article argues that the seemingly contradictory mobilization of militarized policing and ...
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Abstract
Rio de Janeiro is home to over one-thousand favelas (slums), the majority of which are controlled by armed drug traffickers engaged in a long-standing war with police. This article shows how state legitimacy is challenged by the everyday reality of dual power, postcolonial legacies of inequality and marginalization, and a porous culture of law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one of the largest favelas in the city, I argue that police actions revolve around the enactment of violent spectacle, performed by ...
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Abstract
Ghana is widely considered as “a beacon of hope for democracy in Africa” (Gyimah-Boadi 2010, 137). Yet substantive democratic transformations of policing have stagnated mainly because the police continue to act as a handmaiden of the state and powerful elites. Consequently, the reliance on performance in crime control and order maintenance as the bedrock of colonial police legitimacy (as judged by colonial administrators) has survived unscathed. Anxieties about violent crime, mainly in urban areas, have accompanied the pursuit of neoliberal economics ...
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Abstract
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes’ socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and of justifying and actualizing gendarmes’ self-perception as intellectuals in uniform. Bureaucratic work, I argue, is always also aesthetic work, and ...
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Practicing Anthropology, Vol. 34, No. 2. (1 April 2012), pp. 9-12
Abstract
A few years into my policing career in the early 1980s, I decided to pursue a university degree on a part-time basis while working full-time as a police officer. I had no idea what exactly I wanted to study. By this time, however, I was well aware of the duties required of a front-line police responder and was becoming acutely aware that, in the majority of instances, the expectations of the public were very different from the requirements of police procedure. ...
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Abstract
This article sheds new light on Bruno Latour’s sociology of science and technology by looking at his early study of the French writer, philosopher and editor Charles Péguy (1873–1914). In the early 1970s, Latour engaged in a comparative study of Péguy’s Clio and the four gospels of the New Testament. His 1973 contribution to a Péguy colloquium (published in 1977) offers rich insights into his interest in questions of time, history, tradition and translation. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, ...
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Abstract
This article explores methodological issues as a prominent subject in ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a specific group of private security officers, namely, armed response officers, in Durban, South Africa. Through analyzing several experiences from the field, this article highlights the dialectic between emotions and participation in the field and its imperative role in analysis of the research setting. This article explores three different modes of participation, namely, active participation, reluctant participation, and passive participation. As a heuristic device, such a typology ...
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posted to ethics risk social_media
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-16 04:13:55
Abstract
This article analyzes Pranked—a reality-TV show that takes amateur videos from YouTube and formats them into MTV broadcasts—to reconsider the culture industry as social media reconfigures it. For television’s first seven decades, the calculated infliction of severe pain on unsuspecting victims was not deemed suitable for mass consumption. To explain why such broadcasts are possible now, this study analyzes the underappreciated role of entertainment insurers, advancements in social media technologies that allowed the culture industry to circumvent entertainment insurers, and a ...
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Abstract
Objectives: Examine the relative importance of “police performance” and “procedural justice” as antecedents of police legitimacy in situations of acute security threats, in comparison to situations of “no threat.”Method: A unique security situation in Israel allowed for a natural experiment. Using survey data and a multivariate regression approach, the authors compare the importance of “procedural justice” and “police performance” in “Sderot,” an Israeli town facing immediate security threats, with other Israeli communities that did not suffer from specific security ...
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posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-08 14:41:52
Abstract
In this essay I argue that the work of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga is an important resource for contemporary democratic theory because his employment of the concept of play illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of agonistic thought. I employ a reading of Huizinga to explore three central problems of contemporary agonism: the distinction between antagonism and agonism; the representative or expressive character of the agon; and the shaping and limiting of the space of the agon by the materials ...
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posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-08 14:33:41
Abstract
Organizations benefit when employees are motivated and aspiring. Within policing, this is especially important given contemporary philosophies asking officers to take ownership and be proactive. A desire to ascend through the police ranks may inspire greater engagement in the police role. Extant research has noted that promotional aspirations vary among police officers, but unknown at this point are the factors that shape this variation. The current study helps fill this void by analyzing multiple-agency data assessing the impact of demographic, work ...
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posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-03 19:55:28
Abstract
This article examines Walter Benjamin’s 1921 text, “Critique of Violence” in light of its multiple readings. Specifically, different readings and interpretations of this text have become vital to contemporary discussions of police violence, sovereignty, life in the state of exception, revolution, political theology, and most importantly the question of ethical violence. More specifically, if the context of Benjamin’s own writing was the refusal to kill that marked the end of the First World War and the bloody wake that was left ...
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posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-03 19:52:00
Abstract
This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly debates about politics of knowledge in global governance and argues that bringing together insights from aesthetics of governance, science and technology studies, and theories of performativity offers a productive reorientation to existing approaches. My specific question is: how did WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about female genital cutting end up legitimizing them? For anthropologists who participated in the scientific controversy, the answer was clear: the study ...
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posted to crime methamphetamine
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-02-01 14:45:03
Abstract
This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by and ...
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Abstract
This paper examines the role of objects in the constitution and exercise of state power, drawing on a close reading of the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire, an unconventional crime drama set and shot in Baltimore, Maryland. While political geography increasingly recognizes the prosaic and intimate practices of stateness, we argue that objects themselves are central to the production, organization, and performance of state power. Specifically, we analyze how three prominent objects on The Wire – wiretaps, cameras, and standardized ...
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posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-01-27 18:27:18
Abstract
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give signs of knowing and men seem to believe in the spirits ...
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Abstract
The police usually enjoy a great amount of autonomy, of which two levels can be distinguished. The first level (micro level) is called police discretion, and is used by rank-and-file officers. Daily police matters call for quick if not split-second decisions by individual officers on the beat, like bringing someone to the police station, approaching an apparent source of disorder, or following or abandoning the task given by a superior in order to help someone in trouble. The second level (macro ...
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Abstract
Over the years, paramilitary groups and the Colombian state have jointly policed marginal neighborhoods of the city of Medellin. Using evidence from events that have marked the history of this Colombian city, I argue that the murky pact between paramilitary and state forces reveal the nature of the state, as a force of capture, and of its sovereignty. Building on the analysis of the Italian word intreccio (intertwining) that Jane and Peter Schneider use to analyze the Sicilian Mafia and its ...
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Dissent, Vol. 60, No. 1. (2013), pp. 108-111
posted to no-tag
by kevinkarpiak
on 2013-01-04 07:47:24
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Abstract
Cities have long been characterized as lonely, alienating places in literature and the social sciences. This article tracks the theme of urban alienation through both detective fiction and urban ethnography, demonstrating that these literatures also share a focus on two key figures: the Hero and the Policeman. Within an important variant of the genre, the Policeman performs a crucial role, becoming the mechanism through which alienation is enforced. In this regard the Policeman stands in contrast to the Hero, battling over ...
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Abstract
For over 100 years the government of Canada operated residential schools for Aboriginal children that required children be taken out of their homes and educated away from their families. These schools became sites of widespread abuse, the legacy of which continues to influence the lives of those who attended and the generations that followed. As Canada moves through a reconciliation process that includes reparation payments, official apologies, and Truth Commissions, this article considers other modalities that happen in the space between ...
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Abstract
Over the past couple of decades there has emerged a new generation of movements for social justice that in particular embrace ?direct action? and ?do?it?yourself? activism ? that is, the replacing of traditional forms of social movement ?protest? or political agitation with the direct, immediate, and autonomous enactment of the movement's alternative models for living. Among the more successful of these is Critical Mass, a global movement that ?dis?organizes? collective bicycle rides as inclusive and environmentally appropriate alternatives to automotive transit. ...
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Abstract
In recent years, a number of community groups have mounted public campaigns for civilian oversight of police complaint processes, as ?police investigating police? is seen as failing to adhere to a principle of democratic policing: police are accountable to civilian authority. Drawing on notions of policing as a public good, I argue that civilian oversight is a source of physical and ontological security. In developing this perspective, I offer an explanation as to why policing scholars and persons affiliated with community ...
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Abstract
‘Justice’ is commonly defined as rightfulness or fairness, in a wide range of contexts. What constitutes ‘justice’ in detectives' decision making in criminal investigations can begin to be explored only after one is able to place certain values on various degrees of power, freedom and equality. Also this exploration of ‘justice’ in police decision making must be pursued in association with an interrogation of the occupational culture shaped and influenced by both the police organizational structure and the social economic order. ...
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Abstract
This paper sets out to evaluate the potential for community policing (CP) to produce changes in gender equality in police agencies. To that end, the author evaluates if tenets of CP can create the necessary organizational and ideological changes required to move toward a post?gendered subjectivity in the work experiences of officers. If so, then CP tactics could be the start of changes of how traditional policing serves communities, opening a police?community partnership toward significant social change. This paper sets out ...
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Abstract
Looking at some of the most important work-related French films of recent years, this article sets out to do three things. It begins by analysing how the films narrate the exit from Fordism and the accompanying transition from the old disciplinary regime to a new one characterised by a ?caring? eugenics. It continues by contrasting the old Fordist and new post-Fordist human subjects and the spatial and material universes they inhabit. It concludes by evaluating the capacity of the films to ...
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Abstract
Surveys of public opinion conducted at different times in Canada and in the UK show that many more respondents believe in the criminal courts than in the police for controlling crime. The implications of this perceived gap in the crime control efficiency of punishing and of policing are examined through an analysis of the notions of penal justice and of security, considered as providing the theoretical underpinnings of two paradigms of crime control. These two concepts are discussed in terms of ...
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Abstract
The subject of this article is police reform in North America. The article is divided in two parts. The first part reviews the recent past with respect to reforming the police in Canada. I examine the case of the reform of the Montreal police, which tried to implement an approach modelled on COP-POP principles. The reform process lasted for some 18 years and covers two periods. From 1987 to 1993, the service tried unsuccessfully to reform the mentalities of its officers, ...
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posted to love
by kevinkarpiak
on 2011-10-19 22:14:30
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posted to love politics
by kevinkarpiak
on 2011-10-19 22:12:18
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posted to anthropology love money
by kevinkarpiak
on 2011-10-19 22:09:20
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Abstract
Through interviews with police and document analysis this article examines the movement of video surveillance images from source to police to the courts in order to assess and refine the surveillant assemblage concept. Using this concept, the case study reveals asymmetrical criminalization processes involving movement of this visual information. The study finds that most video surveillance images transferred to police come from private sources as a consequence of function creep and that their movement epitomizes creation of criminalized ‘data-doubles’. However, the ...
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Abstract
Over the past three decades, the industrialized world has witnessed four resilient social trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. In this paper, we examine the relationship between these trends by theorizing and operationalizing the notion of the “industrial reserve army” and a series of related tenets in order to conduct an international ( N ...
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posted to neoliberalism police policing
by kevinkarpiak
on 2011-09-12 17:02:12
Abstract
This article explores new ways in which the police are thinking about, or should be thinking about their role in a plural, neo-liberal, and networked society. It draws on the vision developed by the Nexus Policing Project of the Victoria Police, Australia. This article argues that the public police have clung onto the dream that they are able to monopolise policing. We argue that this is but a dream and that the police need to reconfigure their self-identity and their role ...
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Abstract
Objectives To examine the impacts of broken windows policing at crime hot spots on fear of crime, ratings of police legitimacy and reports of collective efficacy among residents of targeted hot spots. Methods A block randomized experimental design with a police intervention targeting disorder delivered to 55 treatment street segments with an equal number of segments serving as controls. Main outcomes were measured using a panel survey of 371 persons living or working in these sites. Results The broken windows police ...
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Abstract
Community policing presents its own distinct governance and accountability challenges. Local community police officers, for example, can find themselves stretched between the accountability demands of the local community and those flowing from professional, managerial and central government sources. Drawing on the results of a recent ethnographic study on neighbourhood police officers in rural and urban areas in the Netherlands, this article probes the nature and extent of these tensions and the coping strategies deployed by the officers in question and the ...
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Abstract
The aim of this article is to establish the extent to which the history of music can offer new perspectives on the modern period. We need a change of perspective, moving away from the aesthetic debates on music to an investigation of actual experiences and practices of participants. Audience behaviour provides a link between musical production and society. In order to make opera houses and concert halls visible as social spheres, this article draws on examples from the musical life of ...
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Abstract
Starting from the recently translated biography of Max Weber by Joachim Radkau, this essay re-evaluates Weber's science of reality in relation to his personality, the cultural context of the early twentieth century, and the position of Weber's thought in the sociological canon. The argument progresses through sequentially enlarged analyses, which propose that Weber's general style of thinking is a type of dissonant composition that places emphasis on the many relationships between cultural reality and the concepts derived from it, and not ...
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Abstract
This article attends to the television show <i>The Wire</i>s (20022008) soundtrack, demonstrating some of the ways in which it specifically seeks to engage the ear of its audience. The ways in which <i>The Wire</i> explores the roles of both sound and vision in law enforcement are examined. The article suggests that the show draws attention to often overlooked acoustic aspects of police culture. <i>The Wire</i> demonstrates how the ever increasing importance of technologies of surveillance, such as closed-circuit television and wiretaps, ...
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Abstract
<i>The Wire</i> has not only been identified as one of the greatest television studies of the destitution of the modern American city through the genre of the police procedural, but it has also been hailed as a modern work of tragedy. The strength and depth of its characters confer upon them the tragic status of brave and courageous individuals battling the vagaries of fate. For Simon and Burns, the contemporary gods are, however, the faceless forces of modern capitalism. While acknowledging ...
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Abstract
While the People’s Armed Police (PAP) has existed in China for over 26 years, the force’s operations, powers and duties have never been formally stipulated. On August 27, 2009, the People’s Armed Police Law was passed by the National People’s Congress. The PAP Law, which contains seven chapters and 38 articles, covers the main areas of the tasks and responsibility, duties and power, safeguard measures, discipline and supervision, and legal responsibilities of the force. The implementation of the PAP Law represents a ...
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Abstract
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of a model for empirical studies of conservative and innovative forces in police training and the professional lives of police officers. The model is based on frame factor theory and is demonstrated against Swedish police research and the authors own observations and experiences of the Swedish police organization and police training. The authors conclude that the model can be used to describe and understand the everyday practice that police students and ...
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Abstract
In 2007, the Socialist Party selected a woman to contest the presidential election. This paper looks at whether or not this brought about a new gender gap in voting behaviour. The question is all the more relevant as Ségolène Royal clearly made strategic use of gender in the campaign. Drawing on two surveys conducted before and after the 2007 presidential election, answers to this question will be presented. The data illustrate both a gender and a generational effect which reinforced and ...
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Abstract
In terms of its ability to hold the attention of the viewer and to require an engagement with hundreds of characters and numerous complex institutions and organisations in over 60 hours of real-time television, David Simon and Ed Burns television drama, <i>The Wire</i>, offers the prospect of a new socio-spatial imagination. Drawing on the work of C. Wright Mills and Theodore Adorno I argue that fictional social critique in the form of the televisual novel can be a more effective medium ...
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posted to the_wire
by kevinkarpiak
on 2010-10-27 21:04:29
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