659807

research-article2016
TCR0010.1177/1362480616659807Theoretical CriminologyKarpiak

Introduction

Theoretical Criminology

No longer merely “good

2016, Vol. 20(4) 419­–429
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616659807
anthropology of police as a tcr.sagepub.com

mode of critical thought

Kevin Karpiak
Eastern Michigan University, USA

Abstract
Images of police, punishment, and crime were central to the work of several of the
key thinkers of the 20th century: the interpolative hail of the policeman for Althusser;
the violence of the policeman in the shadow of law’s excess for Benjamin; the figure
of the panopticon and, later, of police as the administration of man internal to the
State for Foucault (to name just a few). Police, crime, and punishment were useful to
consider a wide swath of issues including subjectivity, inequality, sovereignty, power,
and text. 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? Pushing this question more broadly, how
does studying such subjects “head on” reshape how we reflect on the larger issues in
critical theory today? This collection of articles will attempt to address such questions
through ethnographic accounts that interrogate the limits and alternative possibilities
for thinking about police. 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 but also places critical police studies at the
center of our understanding of what it means to be human today.

Keywords
Anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, police, social theory

Corresponding author:
Kevin Karpiak, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, 712
Pray Harrold, Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA.
Email: kkarpiak@emich.edu
420 Theoretical Criminology 20(4)

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 indi-
viduals 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 theoreti-
cal 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 lan-
guage, 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 anthro-
pology 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 “rap-
port” 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 dif-
ference 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 anthro-
pologists 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
Karpiak 421

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 rela-
tively 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 police3

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 cul-
tures. 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 epis-
temology), 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 contem-
porary 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 endeav-
ors into some of the traditional sites of criminology, especially prisons and other deten-
tion 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
422 Theoretical Criminology 20(4)

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 reac-
tion to this evasion, redirected to almost exclusive focus on the various forms of suffer-
ing 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 mar-
ginalized 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 cock-
fight, 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 crea-
tion 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
Karpiak 423

the methodological pivot through which “real” ethnographic relations can be estab-
lished; 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 exam-
ple, in documenting the profound effects of discriminatory policing on minority com-
munities (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 “par-
ticipant-observation rooted in field experience” or “cross-cultural and comparative per-
spectives” 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 anthro-
pologist)” (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, surveil-
lance, oversight, discretion, public/private, culture, and violence) as well as the work of
424 Theoretical Criminology 20(4)

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 net-
works” (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 “plu-
ralized” 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 applica-
tion 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 chal-
lenge 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 “sousveil-
lance” (Mann et al., 2002)—what they call either “techno-optimistic” or “techno-pessimis-
tic” 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 con-
tribute simultaneously to an anthropology of police and an anthropology of ethics (Faubion,
Karpiak 425

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 anthropologi-
cal 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, situa-
tions, 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 demo-
cratic (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 anthro-
pological 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.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article:This research was made possible through funding by Eastern Michigan
University’s Faculty Research Fellowship program.

Notes
1. See Cusset (2008) for a particularly helpful study of the transnational academic politics that
help shape the shifting content of the term “critical theory”.
2. For preliminary attempts to explore this problematic, see below as well as William Garriott
(2013). Despite its foundational ties with many of the disciplines traditionally associated with
police studies—cognate disciplines such as comparative legal science, sociology, political
science, and criminology—the discipline of anthropology has only recently seen the emer-
gence of a topical subfield interested specifically in the ethnographic description and broader
theorization of policing. This lacuna can be attributed to several factors intimately tied to
the discipline’s core self-understanding, chief among them its historical role as a discipline
426 Theoretical Criminology 20(4)

whose raison d’etre rests upon serving within the interdisciplinary ecumene as specialists in
the study of non-western, small-scale, pre-modern societies existing outside, or at most only
in parallel to, state formations. Ancillary to this self-definition has been a professional ethical
commitment to offering voice to and acting as the political champions of otherwise disenfran-
chised groups.
3. This section draws heavily on Karpiak (2016).
4. See the work of George Marcus (1998) for a description of this relationship in the anthropo-
logical canon.
5. See Mutsaers et al. (2015) for a further exploration, along these lines.

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Author biography
Kevin G Karpiak is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, &
Criminology at Eastern Michigan University. His work focuses on policing as a useful nexus for
exploring questions in anthropology, politics, and ethics. He has published widely on anthropological
approaches to police and, since 2009, he has served as the General Editor of the group academic blog
Anthropoliteia. His ethnographic manuscript, The Police against Itself: Assembling a “Post-Social”
Police provides an account of the ethical work undertaken by police officers, administrators, educa-
tors, and citizens as they experiment with new forms of sociality “after the social moment” in France.