Book review: Kevin G Karpiak and William Garriott (eds), The Anthropology of Police
| Author | Beatrice Jauregui |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618810964 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
438 Theoretical Criminology 23(3)
explored in earlier texts by scholars such as Hebdige (1979). Lopez-Aguado seems to
suggest that young people’s embrace of putative “gang” aesthetics, while also resist-
ing gang identities, actually raises complex questions against the existing literature on
subculture and resistance that I would have liked to have seen the author explore in
some more depth.
This is a rich text which makes an important theoretical contribution, as it grapples
with—and extends—core sociological themes about the reproduction of socially struc-
tured social arrangements. Lopez-Aguado points to the ways that a social group’s deep
embeddedness in the social institutions of punishment can also serve to shape the broader
social order; one wonders whether it was indeed the city of Fresno (and state of California)
that allowed him to make this insight, or if it may indeed be possible to examine these
dynamics in other, less explicitly segregationist state penal systems? For example, he
points to the desegregation of Texas prisons and the resultant decline in assaults. One
also wonders whether an analysis of prison guard and police perspectives on these
dynamics—which Lopez-Aguado begins to do through some of his field notes about
teacher perspectives—might also shed light on the ways that those in power contribute
to the carceral order.
Lopez-Aguado uses a powerful term—“imprisonable” (p. 191) to describe the ways
that people’s identities become marked within carceral institutions and then “exported”
(p. 191) back into the communities they come from. His book provides us with a stark
understanding of the processes of mass criminalization and incarceration through a rich
analysis of the ways that notions of criminality adhere to racialized social identities
through the work of the very institutions of punishment themselves.
References
Bonilla-Silva E (2001) White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO:
Lynne Reiner.
Hebdige D (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Padstow: TJ International.
Kevin G Karpiak and William Garriott (eds), The Anthropology of Police, Routledge: London,
2018; 248 pp.:9781138919655, £52.84 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Beatrice Jauregui, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Ethnographic research with public police rose to prominence among sociologists, crimi-
nologists, and organizational theorists in the mid-20th century. Seminal works published
in the 1970s by US-based scholars like William Westley, Egon Bittner, Peter Manning,
and John Van Maanen examined the everyday micro-dynamics of things like officers dis-
criminating among and demanding “respect” from plural publics; inhabiting their role as
the state’s primary means of coercion; and participating in complex rituals of control,
mediatized myth-making, and dramaturgy. Direct engagement with police institutions and
actors by anthropologists began in earnest quite a bit later, around the turn of the 21st
century, following a confluence of shifts in the discipline toward critical analyses of states,
urban environments, and forces and relations of globalization. Kevin Karpiak and William
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