No longer merely “good to think”: The new anthropology of police as a mode of critical thought
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659807 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Author | Kevin Karpiak |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
Theoretical Criminology
2016, Vol. 20(4) 419 –429
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616659807
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No longer merely “good
to think”: The new
anthropology of police as a
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
659807TCR0010.1177/1362480616659807Theoretical CriminologyKarpiak
research-article2016
Introduction
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