Book review: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data: Surveillance, Race and the Future of Law Enforcement
| Author | Fernando Avila |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618813762 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 121
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 incom-
plete. When Jauregui writes that the state has been approached as “a peculiar kind of sub-
ject, 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 limita-
tions 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 rela-
tional 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.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data: Surveillance, Race and the Future of Law
Enforcement, New York University Press: New York, 2017; 272 pp.: 9781479892822, $28.00
(cloth)
Reviewed by: Fernando Avila, University of Toronto, Canada
The book engages with an exciting new development in policing which is incorporating
big data technologies (e.g. algorithms and data-driven surveillance) into its long-estab-
lished practices. In this scenario, “big data” is a term that refers to the collection and
analysis of large data sets with the goal to reveal hidden patterns or insights (p. 8) and to
provide better and objective outcomes with less effort and budget. However, as the
author warns us, the resulting blend between new technologies, long-standing police
practices, racial discrimination embedded in society, structural inequalities, and lack of
transparency may lead to what he calls the “dangers of black data” (p. 5). By “black
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