Book review: William Garriott (ed.), Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Policing in Practice
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659815 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Author | Pat O’Malley |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 521
reciprocity. In Manhunts, he condemns slaveowners for using intermediaries, whether
mercenaries or hunting dogs, to capture fugitive slaves: “[t]his is a schema with three
terms rather than two” (Chamayou, 2012: 67). In the end, it is the presence of this third
term, of a medium for violence, that discomfits Chamayou most about drones. “One is
never spattered,” he writes at one point, “by the adversary’s blood” (pp. 117–118). In his
mistrust of mediation, Chamayou is in good company as part of a theoretical tradition that
Alexander Galloway (2014) has glossed as iridescent. But to critique drone warfare on
this basis risks making a fetish of copresence, as if all that was needed to resolve the prob-
lem of state violence was to shut down the servers and to stare each other in the face.
References
Chamayou G (2012) Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Trans. Rendall S. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Chamayou G (2013) Théorie du Drone. Paris: La Fabrique.
Galloway AR (2014) Love of the middle. In: Galloway AR, Thacker E and Wark M (eds)
Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 25–76.
Neocleous M (2014) Air power as police power. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
31(4): 578–593.
Suchman L (2015) Situational awareness: Deadly bioconvergence at the boundaries of bodies and
machines. MediaTropes 5(1): 1–24.
William Garriott (ed.), Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Policing in
Practice, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2013; 280 pp. + xxi 978 – 1- 137-30967-9 Price $100
Reviewed by: Pat O’Malley, Faculty of Law, The University of Sydney, Australia
Policing and Contemporary Governance focuses on ‘the anthropology of police in prac-
tice’. Refusing a priori ideas of what police are (e.g. agents of ‘law enforcement’), it
seeks instead to understand police as productive and reflective of forms of sociability.
For example: analyses of police culture focus less on familiar interrogations of ‘in group’
values and mores than on how police shape and reflect cultural practice more generally.
A study of ‘policing everyday life’ examines how police shape understandings of race
and class, while police violence is analysed in terms of how this mediates more general
questions about violence in democracy or widespread ambivalence of poor people about
what is ‘justice’. Its ‘anthropology’ is thus more than a simple reliance on ethnographic
methods.
While anthropology has largely escaped its dubious association with colonial domi-
nation nonetheless the focus of this volume on police in other than the North is one of
the features that makes this volume stand out as ‘anthropological’—given that police
have long been studied ethnographically by other disciplines. The overwhelming major-
ity of studies of police and policing focus on the North: the core nations of the colonial
and neo-colonial world. There still exists a widespread assumption among criminolo-
gists that police and policing are defined by the history, forms and operations of police
institutions in those states. Very little attention has been paid to police in the periphery—
especially police formed through indigenous initiatives. This volume is corrective in
To continue reading
Request your trial