Policing and Contemporary Governance The Anthropology of Police in Practice

What is it that police and policing actually do? What are the effects? And how are these effects mediated and experienced by different people at different times and in different contexts? Examining these questions, the contributors in this volume draw attention to the centrality of police and policing to the project of governance and the experience of being human in the contemporary world. They seek to make sense of and counteract the contemporary fetishization of police by problematizing their taken-for-granted existence and understanding their impact on contemporary human life. To this end, this volume provides a preliminary step in the establishment of an anthropology of police and policing.

William Garriott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at James Madison University, USA.

Foreword; John Comaroff
Introduction: Police in Practice: Policing and the Project of Contemporary Governance; William Garriott
PART I: POLICING THE EVERYDAY
1. Invading the Favela: Echoes of Police Practices Among Brazil's Urban Poor; Benjamin Penglase
2. Policing Methamphetamine: Police Power and the War on Drugs in a Rural US Community; William Garriott
PART II: POLICE VIOLENCE
3. Adjusting La Police: the Use of Distance in the Calibration of Legitimate Violence Among the Police Nationale; Kevin Karpiak
4. The Paradox of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil; Teresa Caldeira
5. Dirty Anthropology: Epistemologies of Violence and Ethical Entanglements in Police Ethnography; Beatrice Jauregui
PART III: POLICE CULTURE
6. Police as Linking Principle: Rethinking Police Culture in Contemporary Taiwan; Jeffrey T. Martin
7. Thai Police in Refractive Cultural Practice; Eric J Haanstad
PART IV: POLICING FUTURES
8. Policing Private Property Against Poverty in Metropolitan Manila; Philip Parnell
9. Interpol and the Emergence of Global Policing; Meg Stalcup
Afterword; Joseph Masco