Book review: Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order and Security in India
| Author | Amrita Ibrahim |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618776077 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 119
frequency than in the past for their behavior. Schools, too, as he shows, became punitive
spaces in which poor children of color were (and are) increasingly identified and tar-
geted for criminalization.
Feld does see some hope in the contemporary “Kids Are Different” era, where, for
the first time, brain science has been used to limit the most severe sentences states
inflicted on children, including the death penalty and life without parole. The reforms,
while significant, are not enough. We must not punish children, Feld argues passion-
ately, for the perceived shortcomings of their parents. Instead, we need to provide them
with opportunities.
Building on the work of seminal scholars in the fields of law, criminology, sociology,
and history and on his own studies on landmark Supreme Court cases, Feld’s work con-
tributes to our understanding of the transformations in the juvenile court across the 20th
century. Feld primarily focuses on the experiences of African Americans; it would have
been interesting to see Feld push this part of his analysis further as it pertains to girls and
other minority youths, particularly Latinas/os who now make the largest minority in the
United States and are also severely over-represented in the system. Nevertheless, his
work provides a solid foundation from which to rethink the interplay of race, gender, and
class as well as the social and political context in the criminalizing of children. To this
reviewer, Feld’s study provides an invitation to continue to refine this important research
and advocate for just and humane policies.
Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order and Security in India, University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 2016; 205 pp.: 9780226403700, $35.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Amrita Ibrahim, Georgetown University, USA
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 geneal-
ogy 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 postco-
lonial 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 author-
ity, 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 chal-
lenged to demonstrate how their interventions contribute to an appreciation of police
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