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The SAGE Handbook

of Social Anthropology
Anthropology and Public Policy

Contributors: Richard Fardon & Olivia Harris & Trevor H. J. Marchand & Mark Nuttall &
Cris Shore & Veronica Strang & Richard A. Wilson
Print Pub. Date: 2012
Online Pub. Date: September 05, 2012
Print ISBN: 9781847875471
Online ISBN: 9781446201077
DOI: 10.4135/9781446201077
Print pages: 89-105
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

University of Auckland
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10.4135/9781446201077
[p. 89 ]

Chapter 1.6: Anthropology and Public


Policy
Cris Shore

(Why) Policy Matters


Anthropologists have long worked alongside public policy initiatives and been linked
to government policy programmes; they have often witnessed the impact of policies
upon the people's and cultures they study and on the institutions where they themselves
work. But only relatively recently has policy itself become an object and subject of
anthropological enquiry. In many respects, the study of policy represents a blind spot
for anthropology in much the same way that colonialism once did: everywhere present
and embedded in the framework of social action, yet curiously unremarked upon and
seemingly invisible to critical analysis. The reasons for this anthropological neglect may
also have similar foundations: as with colonialism, anthropology's encounters with policy
highlight key ethical, political and epistemological challenges for the discipline in terms
of its own entanglements with politics and power.
Until the 1990s, most anthropological engagement with policy making tended to be of
an applied and largely uncritical nature: i.e. commissioned studies or consultancytype research that tended to be framed around the implicit (and sometimes quite
explicit) question, How can anthropology best serve policy makers or help solve
policy problems? (Cochrane 1980; Willner 1980). The idea that anthropological
knowledge should be more applied and thus more relevant to policy makers, or that
anthropological research should be harnessed to service the needs of government
(or industry) is not a recent notion. Even in the 1940s and 1950s Evans Pritchard
(1951) had sought to promote applied anthropology as a kind of managerial
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science of mankind. Three decades later, leading figures in British anthropology


including Raymond Firth (1981) were advancing equally narrow definitions of applied
anthropology in terms of its perceived value for government or, as it is now
commonly termed, relevance to end-users.
In terms of its methodology and focus, the anthropology of policy is very different from
applied anthropology. However, the question of utility and relevance raises a wider
debate over what exactly anthropologists seek to achieve by applying their knowledge
or engaging with policy makers: Is it dialogue, influence over policy professionals, or
a way for academics to shape the formation or implementation of public policy? Or is
the goal to unpack policy as a cultural category and to analyse its uses in order to shed
light on structures and processes that shape society? To echo Feldman (2007), should
anthropology follow the policy gaze, or seek to critique it? Or can it do both?
In recent years, anthropologists have increasingly shifted towards the latter position,
developing analytical approaches that [p. 90 ] seek to problematize policy both as a
concept, or idea-force, and as a set of related practices (Shore and Wright 1997; Wedel
et al. 2005). If this is one area that distinguishes the anthropology of policy from applied
anthropology, it is also differentiates it from policy studies. Whereas most scholars
tend to treat policy as a given, seldom questioning its meaning or ontological status
as a category, an anthropology of policy starts from the premise that policy is itself a
curious and problematic social and cultural construct that needs to be unpacked and
contextualized if its meanings are to be understood.
The anthropology of policy also originated from a growing recognition that policy has
become an increasingly central and dominant organizing principle of contemporary
society, perhaps even of modernity itself (Shore and Wright 1997: 6). This is manifest
not least in the pervasiveness of policy(ies) and in the bewilderingly complex ways the
concept is put to work. Virtually every aspect of human life is now shaped by policies,
whether these emanate from governments, public institutions or non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and private-sector bodies: From policies on international trade,
resource management, law and order, national security and public health, to policies
that define building regulations, employment relations, education, taxation, citizenship
rights, the use of domestic space and the conduct of sexual conduct. From the moment
of birth, people become subjects of policies that classify, order and regulate their
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behaviour, define their status and frame the norms of conduct that are expected of them
(Shore and Wright 1997: 4).
Policies are typically thought of as the property of governments and political parties,
but they are now increasingly central to the functioning of a vast range of other
institutions, from schools, hospitals and universities, to commercial businesses, financial
corporations, charities and insurance companies whose products are also defined
as policies. All of these organizations depend upon policies to define their mission or
institutional raison d'tre, as well as to lend coherence and legitimacy to their goals.
Policy, it seems, has become indispensable to the work of the modern state and its
bureaucratic apparatus and to modern organizations in general.
This chapter sets out to explore anthropology's contribution to the analysis of policy and
the implications of a focus on policy for the discipline as a whole. I ask:

1. What exactly is policy as a subject of anthropological analysis and how


does anthropology's approach differ to that of policy studies?
2. What can anthropology contribute to our understanding of how policies
work as agents of change and as instruments of power?
3. How does a focus on policy contribute to anthropology, and what are
the implications for the discipline in terms of its methodology and research
focus?

In addressing these questions, I want to stress two key analytical themes. First, I
show how anthropology provides a necessary corrective to the rational choice models
and unreflexive positivistic accounts that still dominate the way that policy processes
are typically conceptualized among academics and policy professionals. Second,
I argue that policy provides anthropology with a lens for analysing wider political
processes and systems of government. Through studying policy we can gain critical
insight into the complex ways in which concepts, institutions and actors (or what I
call policy assemblages) interact in different sites either to consolidate regimes of
power/knowledge or to create new rationalities of governance. In this sense, policies
are technologies that powerfully influence human consciousness and behaviour; they
create the bureaucratic taxonomies that define the conditions of people's existence.
The main contribution of the anthropology of policy, therefore, is to the sub-fields of
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political anthropology, the anthropology of the state and anthropology at home. The
case study I use to illustrate these points concerns two of the defining policies of this
century: the US Homeland Security Act and the War on Terror. I argue that these [p.
91 ] initiatives are both cause and effect of the pervasive sense of insecurity and risk
that has come to characterize US society. But they are also symptomatic of the way that
military norms and values are reshaping the fabric of liberal society.

Policy and Policy Studies


Spurred by dissatisfaction with the conventional positivistic approach which represents
policy analysis as a kind of scientific endeavour, a number of scholars within political
science and international relations have sought to develop alternative perspectives
drawing on ethnography and other qualitative methods (Rhodes et al. 2007). In some
instances, this cultural turn in policy studies has been influenced by anthropology,
particularly the work of Geertz, most notably in the development of Interpretive Policy
Analysis (Yanow 1996, 2000). Others, drawing on continental European philosophy,
have turned to linguistics, discourse analysis and rhetoric as a way of rethinking
policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993; Fischer 2003; Gottweis 2006; Peters
and Pierre 2006; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). These developments open up a
promising space for dialogue between anthropology and the more qualitatively oriented
policy studies (Yanow 2011). However, while such approaches have introduced more
qualitative perspectives into mainstream political science and the broad interdisciplinary
field of policy studies (which includes politics, economics, operational research,
organizational studies and public administration), they have done little to challenge
the positivistic paradigm that prevails within these disciplines. That paradigm typically
represents policy as an object rather than a set of cultural processes and practices.
Being an artefact, it follows that policies must have authors rational actors called
policy makers who make policy through a process of calculation and authorization.
This paradigm, which Colebatch, Hoppe and Noordegraaf (2010) call authoritative
instrumentalism, embodies at least four key assumptions: there are objective
entities called policies; these are addressed to solving particular problems; they
result from decisions made by some rational authority (a government, committee,
management board, chief executive, etc.); and they are intended to produce some
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known and measurable outcome. According to this account, policy is conceptualized as


governments identifying problems, making decisions and bringing public resources to
bear upon these problems.
Most academic research is also premised on the idea of policy as a neat, hierarchical
and seamless flow that moves from agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy
adoption, to policy implementation (and enforcement') and policy evaluation
which then lead to policy reviewing and updating. This policy cycle model, with its
instrumental-rational assumptions, is the received wisdom and starting point for most
textbooks today and continues to shape the way policy is taught in professional Master's
programmes and schools of government. Moran, Rein and Goodin's Oxford Handbook
of Public Policy (2006) exemplifies this tendency. Their book begins by noting that
policy studies emerged from operations research during the Second World War and
was originally envisaged as a handmaiden of government. Yet while the editors seek to
challenge that instrumental conception by giving voice to many different perspectives
on public policy, the way the book is framed simply reinforces the high modernism
approach that they criticize. Thus, policies are narrowly defined as programmes
by which officers of the state attempt to rule and as instruments of this assertive
ambition (Moran, Rein and Goodin 2006: 3). The book ends with two appendices, one
containing a prcis of the 2004 Queen's Speech outlining the British government's
legislative programme, and the other a summary of President George Bush's 2004
State of the Union Address. The message conveyed here is that these texts capture
the [p. 92 ] essence of what policy is really all about echoing Thomas Dye's (1972)
narrow definition of policy as whatever governments decide to do or not to do.
Despite talk of postpositivism in the policy sciences (DeLeon and Martell 2006: 39),
most policy studies literature still portrays policy as a process in which one set of
atomized rational individuals pursue authorized goals while another group of analysts
equally rational and atomized measure the costs and benefits and review the effects
of policy. Iris Geva-May's book (2005) Thinking Like a Policy Analyst epitomizes this
tendency. For Geva-May, learning to think like a policy analyst is not unlike learning
to think like a doctor or other clinical disciplines: both require proper professional
training, mastery of the appropriate tricks of the trade and the diagnostic skills of
a practicing clinician. Policy analysis, she declares, is far too important to be left to
untrained amateurs (2005: 25).
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These arguments illustrate precisely why policy analysis needs to be rescued from the
policy analysts, just as Hart (Chapter 1.10) argues that economics needs to be freed
from the myopia of economists. The same vision of policy analysis as a science, and
the same flawed rational choice models based on assumptions about rational actors
producing predictable policy outcomes, also underlies the efficient-market hypothesis
of mainstream economics and modern finance. The anthropology of policy tries to go
beyond learning the tricks of the trade in order to step outside the box and explore how
policies work in practice, the conditions that create and sustain them and the kinds of
relations they produce.

Anthropological Approaches to Policy


In contrast to these overly rationalistic and statist models of policy, anthropological
approaches emphasize the contingency, fluidity and messiness of policy processes.
They highlight the fact that policies are not confined to texts; nor are they simply
constraining, instrumental-rational rational forces imposed from above by some
authoritative entity. Rather, policy is both productive and performative, a complex,
creative process that produces new kinds of relationships, new spaces for exchange,
and new kinds of subjectivity. But the process by which policies develop is often
ambiguous and contested. What is anthropologically interesting about a particular
policy is its genealogy and the contestations and negotiations involved in its formation.
Anthropological accounts are also sensitive to the way people experience, interpret and
engage with these policy processes and to what policies mean in different contexts.
To paraphrase Clifford Geertz (1973: 5), we take the analysis of policy to be not an
experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
However, the analysis of any policy requires more than just thick description; we also
need to examine the contexts in which policies are embedded, the work they perform
and their preconditions and genealogies, and their effects. Understanding why certain
policies succeed or fail also entails knowing something about the way they are
experienced and interpreted by people whose lives they effect. What makes the State
of the Union Address (or the Queen's Speech) anthropologically significant is not only
its content or language but also how people receive and interpret it, what they do with it
and the way it effects their lives. Policies might therefore also be viewed as condensed
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symbols and as floating signifiers; their meaning is cultural and defined by context.
Rather than taking policy as an un-analysed given, anthropology asks: What does policy
mean in this context? What work does it perform and what are its effects? How does
this policy relate to other institutions and practices within the particular society? And
what were the conditions that made this policy possible?
An important starting point is the meaning and use of the term policy. Mention of [p.
93 ] policy usually brings to mind public administration, government and politics
these being the standard dictionary definitions of the term. However, the semantics
of the concept reveal some important secondary meanings. From the Greek polis
(city) to the Latin politia came two associated meanings: the first was polity (meaning
civil organization, form of government and constitution of the state), and the second,
policy (meaning the art, method or tactics of government; the method for regulating
internal order (Partridge 1958: 509)). With the formation of Robert Peel's new police
in 1829, this last constellation of meanings split: administration of internal order
became a domain of policing, notionally separate from policy. The meaning of policy
as art of government has also changed. Initially a pejorative term associated with
stratagems, trickery, cunning, deceit, and hypocrisy, policy has now been made
respectable (Pick 1988: 97) in its contemporary guise and is defined in more neutral
terms as a course of action adopted and pursued by a government, party, ruler or
organization (Stevenson 2010).
These semantics highlight two important points. First, if policy has become associated
with the concepts of government and administration, it also belongs to a semantic
cluster that includes policing and polishing or what we might rephrase as
disciplining and the art of spin. The second is that many languages have no word for
policy per se that distinguishes it from the broader field of politics (just as economics
was once deemed inseparable from political-economy, perhaps). We should therefore
be wary of approaches that isolate these fields into discrete disciplinary boxes, thereby
obscuring the inherently social and political nature of policy making.

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Anthropology as Policy Critique: Review of


the Literature
An early inspiration for a more analytical engagement with policy came from American
anthropologist Laura Nader. In her seminal 1972 essay entitled Up the Anthropologist,
Nader called upon anthropologists to reinvent the discipline by studying up; i.e.
shifting the traditional disciplinary focus on the poor, peripheral and marginalized
peoples towards a critical examination of the dominant elites and hidden hierarchies of
corporate power that shape American society, which include not only the large financial
corporations, bureaucracies and political agencies but also the advertising, insurance,
banking, realty or automobile industries, legislative bodies, universities and professional
organizations (Nader 1972: 292).
Anthropologists have responded to Nader's call in various ways, many by focusing
on experts, elite actors and the professional or institutional spaces that they occupy,
which has necessarily entailed a closer interest in policy matters. Notable examples
include Karen Ho's analysis of the world view of Wall Street investment bankers (2005)
and Gillian Tett's (2009) study of the shadow bankers and derivatives entrepreneurs
who brought financial ruin to JP Morgan; studies of stock markets in Chicago (Zaloom
2006) and Shanghai (Hertz 1998); ethnographies of nuclear weapons scientists
(Gusterson 1996; Masco 2004), US military bases (Lutz 2002a), biomedicine and
new reproductive technologies (Franklin, Chapter 1.3; Strathern 1992), genetics
laboratories and universities (Rabinow 1999; Strathern 2000); international courts
(Riles 2006; Wilson 2001); the strategic choices of Japanese traders (Miyazaki 2006);
global customs regimes (Chalfin 2006); economic policy makers in Mexico (Schwegler
2008); and the epistemic cultures of physicists and molecular biologists (Traweek 1988;
Knorr-Cetina 1999). Others have sought to develop theoretical and methodological
frameworks for studying the institutional cultures of elites (Marcus 1983; Shore and
Nugent 2002), and to bring anthropology's critical and reflexive gaze to bear on the
seemingly opaque worlds of policy professionals (Lea 2008). However, while many of
these works deal with policy [p. 94 ] matters or have opened up the black boxes

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inhabited by policy professionals, none of them have sought to theorize the category of
policy itself.
The first systematic attempt to develop policy as a coherent field of anthropological
research was Shore and Wright's edited volume, Anthropology of Policy: Critical
Perspectives on Governance and Power (1997). The authors developed three main
arguments here. The first was that policies are inherently anthropological phenomena
and should be conceptualized as discursive formations through which larger-scale
processes of social and historical change can be mapped. As they also noted, policies
often occupy the same role as myth in traditional societies, providing charters for
action, guides to behaviour and legitimating narratives for leaders and would-be rulers.
Second, while policies can be conceptualized as a type of narrative or performance,
they are also political technologies that serve to create new categories of subjectivity;
for example, citizens, taxpayers, criminals, immigrants, or pensioners. Insofar as
they become internalized, policies also work as techniques of the self. But as with most
forms of power, policy typically disguises the mechanism of its own operation, either
by seeking to naturalize its arbitrariness or by concealing the particularism and hidden
interests that often underlie its formulation.
The third argument entailed the implications of a focus on policy for anthropological
methods. If policies are instruments of power, they also provide instruments for
analysing the operation of power. Following the connections or webs of relations that
policies create provides anthropologists with a framework that links local practices
with wider events and processes. This is not so much a method for studying up
as for studying through (Wright and Reinhold 2011) and engaging in non-local
ethnography (Feldman 2011): i.e. analysing how events, processes and actors
intersect. This represents a significant improvement upon George Marcus's (1995)
ideas about multi-sited ethnography because it provides both a method for exploring
the connections between seemingly disparate nodes in a network of relations
and a framework for contextualizing and conceptualizing that network or policy
assemblage.
The methodological thrust of the essays assembled in Anthropology of Policy drew
heavily on the work of Foucault (1991) and other governmentality theorists. This
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is perhaps unsurprising given that these essays were written in the mid-1990s
when policies of neoliberalization appeared to be spreading particularly throughout
Western societies. Several chapters highlight this. For example, Emily Martin (1997)
shows how leading American blue chip corporations conceptualize and seek to
produce the ideal modern manager, pointing out that these ideal qualities (including
impatience, self-managing, constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities,
etc.), bear strikingly similarities to people with attention-deficit disorder (ADD);
and Susan Hyatt's (1997) account of women on a northern England council estate
during the 1980s Thatcherite reforms, who belatedly discovered that the community
empowerment programme that they had joined in order to improve their housing estate
left them responsible for managing all its problems-while the state quietly withdrew its
responsibility.
These essays provide useful analyses of the shift from government to governance,
which has been a hallmark of the neoliberal programme for rolling back the state by
withdrawing government funding for public services provision. They also show how the
language of community, decentralization and participatory governance has been
mobilized to mask what in effect has been an extension of state power. Hence, the
oft-noted paradox that while neoliberalization and globalization appear to have left the
nation-state increasingly bereft of sovereignty and hollowed out, the power of the state
if measured in terms of state effects has actually grown under neoliberalism [p. 95
] (Mitchell 1999; Trouillot 2001; Khron-Hansen and Nustad 2005).
Neoliberal governmentality also entails instilling habits of self-government and selfmanagement; i.e. techniques of the self that transform the passive objects of state
policy (i.e. individual workers, job-seekers, customers or patients) into active subjects
of their own subjectification. Policy professionals and experts play a key role in this
process as it is by means of expertise, self-regulatory techniques can be installed in
citizens that will align their personal choices with the ends of government (Miller and
Rose 1992:188189).
Several ethnographies have ably documented this process of self-management
and regulation. Governing through empowerment and self-help is analysed in
Cruikshank's (1999) ethnographical study of homeless people in Philadelphia which
powerfully illustrates how liberal democracies increasingly use civic engagement
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and community participation as instruments to create neoliberal subjects. Similarly,


David Mosse's (2005) ethnography of an aid project in western India also lifts the veil
on the politics of civic participation. Mosse shows how the actions of development
workers are driven less by policy goals of laying the groundwork for more grassroots
participation as by the need to legitimize the organization's interventions and to maintain
its relationships.

Beyond Neoliberalism and


Governmentality: Actors, Networks and
Agency
Recent work within the anthropology of policy has both extended and advanced
beyond these governmentality approaches. What unites this scholarship is a shared
methodological concern to use policy as a window for examining wider shifts and
transformations in contemporary political regimes and systems of governance. The
fluidity of policy and the way certain strategically placed actors exploit or manipulate
the opportunities created by government policy agendas is well illustrated in Janine
Wedel's book Collision and Collusion (1998). This ethnographic account of the failures
of Western aid policy in Eastern Europe explains why so many dollars intended for postSoviet reconstruction ended up financing the consultants, bureaucrats and politicians
who brokered the introduction of the new Western economic and political systems in
the former Soviet Union. Wedel's second book, Shadow Elite (2009), uses insights from
Eastern Europe to examine the neoconservative elite that flourished under the Bush
administration, revealing how similar kinds of networks of entrepreneurial individuals
(or flex nets) were able to shift between the public- and private-sector roles to exploit
the new financial opportunities that arose from state policies aimed at encouraging
privatization.
Policy language has been a particularly important focus for political anthropologists
and interpretive policy analysts (Yanow 1996). Alongside participant-observation,
event analysis and extended case studies, critical discourse analysis and metaphor
analysis feature prominently in the anthropological methods used to interrogate policy.
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As a meta-narrative, policy shares many similarities with certain types of universalistic


morality: both make appeals to abstract universalism and are underpinned by a set of
cultural ideals. But unlike universalistic morality, policy typically represents itself as a
rational and collectivist endeavour: i.e. pragmatic, efficient and geared towards serving
the needs of the community, rather than the interests of particular individuals. This
perception that policy can be removed from the domain of ethics or politics is typically
achieved by mobilizing technical, scientific or commonsense language, which recasts
political choices often based on ideology as purely pragmatic or technical acts
based on science. This is well documented in ethnographic studies of bureaucracies,
particularly universities, where the introduction of new systems of management
and accountability [p. 96 ] has promoted the rise of what has been termed audit
culture (Power 1997; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000; Shore 2008) and other
disciplinary regimes of governance (Wright 2008).
Susan Greenhalgh's ethnography Just One Child Science and Policy in Deng's China
(2008) explores similar processes in a non-Western context. Drawing on concepts from
actor-network theory, Greenhalgh shows how a group of aerospace missile engineers
came to dominate the policy agenda as purveyors of the one true science that could
successfully resolve China's population crisis during the 1980s. Their cultural capital as
defence specialists enabled them to define authoritatively both the policy problem itself
and the correct action (or policy assemblage) for its solution.
The way policies travel and the processes or inscription and translation that occur as
they move from one context to another are often more than simply matters of policy
transfer or path dependency. By bringing together assemblages of ideas, institutions
and practices, policies construct new networks of relations and new domains of action
and meaning. From a theoretical perspective, policy can thus be conceptualized as an
actant: an object in a network which, although silent and invisible, nevertheless acts or
shifts actions and performs tasks (Akrich and Latour 1999: 259; Callon 2002: 63).
Policies are thus cultural agents as well as artefacts and their effects may escape
the designs and intentions of their authors (assuming a policy author exists): i.e.
once created, policies enter into complex relations with other actors and agents and
these entanglements have unanticipated consequences. For example, the rise of
insider dealing and the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001 were logical outcomes of
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post-1980s policies aimed at deregulating financial markets. To echo Appadurai (1986),


policies, like material objects, have complex social lives. The spread of New Public
Management or the translation into policy of the broken windows theory and policies
of zero tolerance for crime exemplify this, as do other successful policies, including the
rise of the German manufacturing industry after 1945 or the eradication of violent crime
in New York since the 1980s. To analyse the work of policy, it is therefore important to
reflect on their biographies and the dynamics surrounding their translation and migration
across cultural boundaries.
Another important contribution to the anthropology of policy has been in the study
of nation-building and policies aimed at forging citizenship. This is exemplified in
Feldman's (2005) account of statecraft in Estonia and his analysis of the way the
government in post-Soviet Estonia forged a new national imaginary that legitimized
the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era Russian speakers. The strategic mobilization of
culture and communication policies has been analysed in other contexts, including the
European Commission, which, since the 1980s, has sought to legitimate the European
Union (EU) project through Europeanization initiatives aimed at forging a post-national
European identity (Borneman and Fowler 1997; Shore 2000). These are other important
research areas where the anthropology of policy intersects with the study of language,
political symbolism and state formation.
Although it is important to recognize the agency of policy, the agency of individuals
and communities should not be overlooked. Much of the policy literature has tended to
assume that subjects are passively constructed by policies and that policy bears down
upon individuals like an immutable force majeure or, in the case of governmentality
approaches, works upon the agency of individuals so that they regulate and police
themselves in alignment with the aims of their political rulers. However, more recent
anthropological contributions have focused explicitly on how people negotiate and
contest policy. Examples include Per's (2007) study of local political activism among
immigrant groups in Italy and Flyvbjerg's (1998) ethnography of grassroots democracy
in Denmark. These studies recall James Scott's (1985) work on weapons [p. 97 ]
of the weak and peasant strategies of resistance to state power. Whereas neoliberal
policies seek to govern subjects by aligning the agency of individuals with the norms
of the policy makers, subaltern groups sometimes refuse to know their place (Clarke

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2005: 460) and successfully challenge the terms that policies attempt to foist upon
them.

Anthropology and Militarism


Resistance to regimes of governance raises broader issues of hegemony and
subordination and the question of why certain policies appear so effective in mobilizing
populations and promoting new forms of governance. The post-9/11 US policy of
homeland security provides a good illustration of how an anthropology of policy
approach can shed light onto these wider political processes and systems of
governance. The al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center created a state of
emergency which provided the Bush administration with the justification it needed to
enact sweeping changes to the US legal system. These reforms massively increased
the power of the executive while eroding civil liberties and violating several amendments
of the constitution (Jackson and Towle 2006: 144). Just six weeks after the 9/11 attack,
a panicked Congress passed the hastily drafted and highly draconian antiterrorism
bill titled the USA PATRIOT Act (or Uniting and Protecting America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). This Act, with
its cynical play on the themes of nationhood, security and patriotism, dramatically
revised the nation's surveillance and detention laws, giving unprecedented powers
to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) to spy
on American citizens and detain suspected terrorists. It simultaneously reduced the
legal fire-walls, accountability mechanisms and checks and balances on government
power that had been erected after the Watergate scandal. Senators and Congressmen
were given virtually no opportunity to read the lengthy bill before being asked to vote
on it. The Bush administration implied that members who voted against it were unpatriotic and would be blamed for any further attacks. This was a powerful sanction at a
time when a second attack was expected to follow at any moment and when reports of
letters bearing anthrax were appearing daily.
The language in which the PATRIOT Act was presented to the American public is
particularly significant. While the dominant discourse was national security and the
threat by terrorists who, in the words of George Bush (2001), recognize no barrier of
morality, have no conscience and cannot be reasoned with, the policy narrative was
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filled with metaphors of danger, the urgency of a nation at war and the need to bring
down walls between intelligence-gathering and law enforcement. A recurring motif in
the discourse of the US government was that these measures were necessary tools
to enable our nation's law enforcement, national defense and intelligence personnel
to bring terrorists and other dangerous criminals to justice (US Department of Justice
2004: 1). The Act was followed in November 2001 by the signing of a presidential
directive authorizing trials of suspected terrorists and their collaborators in military
tribunals rather than the courts. Bringing terrorists to justice thus translated into a
curious form of military justice involving detention without trial, extraordinary rendition
of foreign nationals and holding suspects in legal black holes like Guantanamo Bay
all of which violated human rights and the norms of international law.
Following the bombing of Afghanistan and the military assault on Osama bin Laden's
hideout in the Tora Bora caves, Bush delivered his 2002 State of the Union address
in which he coined the phrase axis of evil and warned that the United States would
not permit dangerous regimes in the world to threaten America with weapons of mass
destruction. This provided a foundation for two further key policy developments. [p.
98 ] The first policy was the announcement in June 2002 of the new US defence
doctrine of pre-emption (the right to inflict military strikes on any country suspected
of harbouring terrorists). The second policy was the signing into law in November of
a bill creating a unified Department of Homeland Security, which entailed the largest
reorganization of federal government in over half a century. Born from the post-9/11
climate of insecurity, these two policy initiatives came to define the United States during
the Bush era (Besterman and Gusterson 2010).
These events surrounding the creation of the US state of exception are well
contextualized in the anthropology of militarism literature. The study of militarism, I
argue, represents one of the latest and perhaps most innovative developments within
the fields of political anthropology and the anthropology of policy. Militarism is one
of the most influential cultural forces of our time, drawing together a powerful nexus
of institutions, money, power and influence. Like policy, militarism raises awkward
questions regarding anthropologists' own entanglements with government. Just as
militarism continues to violently shape the international order through the so-called War
on Terror, it is also having a profound effect on democracy and civil liberties through
the impact of the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Bill. But, beyond this, militarism
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is reshaping virtually every sphere of American culture, from education, science,


technology, research and economics, to politics, the judiciary, the media and popular
culture.
Michael Geyer (1989: 79) defines militarization as the contradictory and tense social
process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence. It entails not
only increasing allocation of resources for military purposes but also the re-organization
of non-military systems and institutions in line with military goals and values. Militarism
thus represents a societal and discursive process in which martial values influence
the political sphere and drive social change (Lutz 2002b: 725). Militarism reshapes
norms to legitimate the use of force as a tool of government, the presence of large
permanent standing armies and the allocation of tax revenue to pay for them. It is
intimately connected with the centralization of state power. But, as Lutz illustrates with
her ethnography of Fayetteville, a city near Fort Bragg military base, militarism has
contradictory effects and brings high social costs, including inequality, apartheid-like
conditions, prostitution and environmental devastation around the bases at home and
abroad (Lutz 2002b: 729). It also has more subtle effects, including the deformation of
human potentials into hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality and the rewriting
of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action (Lutz 2002b: 723).
As Gusterson (2007: 164) concurs, militarism redefines masculinity and sexuality and
glorifies war by creating a degraded popular culture saturated with racial and nationalist
stereotypes, aestheticized destruction, and images of violent hypomasculinity.
Over 50 years ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills warned that the US industrial-military
complex and its corporate power were creating a military definition of reality (1956:
191). That trend has continued, particularly through the US film industry and media;
films and television series such as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The
Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Pacific create a powerful nostalgia and desire for war,
encouraging the view that war makes men, grants freedom to the nation and a kind of
supercitizenship to those who wage it (Lutz 2002b: 724).
The impact of US militarism can be measured in financial as well as cultural terms.
Despite an acute budget deficit gripping the US economy, the estimated military
expenditure in 2008 exceeded US$1 trillion (Lutz 2010: 46) a sum six times larger
than any other military in the world (SIPRI 2008). The United States also ranks as
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the world's largest arms manufacturer and dealer, with sales for 2006 alone totalling
US$123.54 billion, [p. 99 ] some five time higher than the next five major arms
suppliers combined (Sharp 2008). All this money is mobilized to sustain the hegemonic
military ideal that war is human nature and violence has the power to get things
done (Lutz 2010: 55). The military is also the largest employer in the United States,
with a workforce of 2.3 million soldiers and 700,000 civilians and millions more receiving
defence-related contracts (Lutz 2010: 47). Some 5% of the US workforce is thus directly
or indirectly employed by the military and fully one quarter of all US scientists and
technicians work on military contracts (Lutz ibid).
According to a two-year investigation by the Washington Post, the massive US
intelligence community created in response to the 9/11 attacks has now become so
inefficient, unmanageable and extensive that no-one knows its exact costs or size
(Priest and Arkin 2010). Among its discoveries, the Washington Post investigation
found: 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on
programmes related to counterintelligence, homeland security and intelligence in about
10,000 locations across the United States; an estimated 854,000 people who hold topsecret security clearances (a population one-and-a-half times that of Washington), and
who publish between them over 50,000 reports each year a volume so large that
many are routinely ignored. In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for
top-secret intelligence work are either under construction or have been built since 2002,
amounting to some 17 million square feet of space the equivalent of three Pentagons
(Priest and Arkin 2010). If this illustrates how militarism is reshaping the US system of
government, it also reminds us of how policies work to construct new communities of
practice and new social worlds. (Shore and Wright 2011).
The distorting effect of militarization is also evident within US universities (Giroux 2008).
Since 9/11, the US army has actively sought to recruit anthropologists for its war on
terror, particularly its Human Terrain System (HTS) project in Iraq and Afghanistan
(Price 2007). Some anthropologists have responded to this call by arguing that cultural
knowledge of adversaries should be considered a national priority (McFate 2004: 43).
Montgomery McFate, who defines anthropology as a discipline invented to support war
fighting in the tribal zones (2004: 43, 2005: 24), even wrote part of the US Army's 2006
counterinsurgency manual (FM 324). For a discipline more commonly aligned with
social critique, this attempt to co-opt anthropology to serve the CIA and the Pentagon
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has raised a heated debate over professional ethics and the uses of anthropological
knowledge (AAA 2007; Gonzales 2007; Gusterson 2007; McFate 2007; Price 2007,
2010).

Policy as a Critical Mirror: Anthropology and


the War on Terror
The US War on Terror provides an important test case both for the anthropology of
policy and the study of human rights (Wilson 2005; Riles 2006). It also offers a critical
mirror that takes seriously Nader's call for anthropology to study up by examining
the hidden hierarchies in our own societies. Lutz's ethnography of the effects of
militarism in Fayetteville does this. Her study is offered as a microcosm of the process
of militarization in America, showing us the social impact on the city's inhabitants
and what happens in a society in which people are organized for the production of
institutionalized violence. It is precisely because the term militarism is rarely applied
to the United States that its military hegemony is hard to identity. The US PATRIOT
Act provides another microcosm: this time, of the way that regimes of power are
discursively constructed and maintained, and how symbolism, oratory and rhetoric are
mobilized to [p. 100 ] create new subjects of power. As Wedel et al. observe (2005:
47):
Like policy in general, the PATRIOT Act binds together a wide variety of
actors, institutions, and agendas in new and ambiguous relationships.
Actors with the legal, political, or institutional leverage can clarify these
relationships by appealing to the discourses that dominate the current
political climate. National security is perhaps the foremost discourse
of the American present, and it manifests itself in myriad ways in the
practice of daily life as well as in the way it is woven into the fabric of
public policy.
The threat to national security successfully mobilized public support both for and
against direct military action in foreign conflicts, but these actions have paradoxically
contributed to the growing terrorist risk and have made Americans feel less secure
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(Besterman and Gusterson 2010: 14). The phrase War on Terror itself contains a
fundamental paradox. As Nelson (2003: 21) observes, terror is not a thing but a
relationship (my emphasis). It is far from clear how one can wage war on something
as abstract as a relationship but perhaps that is precisely the point: War on Terror
serves a multitude of political and military goals. Policies are tools of government,
political technologies and floating signifiers. An important challenge for anthropology,
beyond analysing the work of policy and the meanings that policies hold, is to develop
alternative analytical frameworks for interpreting policies and analysing the regimes of
truth that they create.
An example of such a challenge is Mahmood Mamdani's (2002) article Good Muslim,
Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on the Culture of Terrorism. Mamdani offers a
more historically contextualized account of the link between Islam and terrorism in
post-9/11 Western discourse by exploring the processes of meaning-making and
identity formation of those who grew up in the refugee camps of Afghanistan. The
Iranian revolution of 1979, he notes, was a turning point for US foreign policy. The
Reagan administration aimed to expand the pro-US Islamic lobby and isolate Iran
both of which were important to the wider goal of intensifying its Cold War with the
Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, its strategy was to unite Muslims in a holy war against
the Soviet Union. The US government therefore trained, equipped and financed the
neofundamentalist mujahidin and al-Qaeda. This was to be the largest covert operation
in the history of the CIA, which in the fiscal year of 1987 alone amounted to 660 million
dollars (Mamdani 2002: 771). The Taliban was a movement born across the border
with Pakistan that grew from the dislocation and brutalization caused by the US war
against the Soviet Union. The Taliban become progressively radicalized and militarized
through the raids and atrocities of the mujahidin. Simply put, after the defeat in Vietnam
and the Watergate scandal, the United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate,
terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet (Mamdani 2002: 769).
But this policy had a further twist. To fund this massive covert operation, the CIA used
the drugs trade just as it had previously done for its operations in Nicaragua. The
effect was to turn the Pakistan-Afghanistan border into the world's top heroin producer,
supplying some 60% of US demand, and raising heroin addiction in Pakistan from zero
in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985 (Mamdani 2002: 771. Mandani thus offers an alternative
anthropologically informed reading of the War on Terror, one that calls on political

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leaders in the United States and Britain to face up to the relationship between their own
policies and contemporary terrorism (Mamdani 2002: 773).

Conclusion
Policies reflect ways of thinking about the world and acting upon it. They contain
implicit models of social organization and visions of how individuals should relate to
society and to each other. They can therefore be analysed as charters for actions and
condensed symbols or blueprints that reflect [p. 101 ] key elements of the wider
cultural systems in which they are embedded. But if policies are performative and
instrumental, they are also inherently political; the quintessential tools of government
and technologies of governance. They are the vehicles through which institutions seek
to act upon the world and to manage, regulate or change society. Policies are therefore
concerned with the imposition of order and coherence on the world; they express a
will to power. However, to describe policies as instrumental should not be taken to
mean they are devoid of symbolism and meaning or that they are necessarily rational
in the conventional positivistic and predictable sense of the term. As the case of the
US Homeland Security Policy illustrates, policies have complex social lives that often
produce irrational and contradictory consequences and set in motion perverse runaway
effects.
The anthropology of policy has become an increasingly significant and coherent subfield of anthropology, but it is still developing. More ethnographies and case studies are
needed to develop this field, but anthropological work on bureaucracy, the state, elites,
militarism and systems of governance are indicative of its challenges and potential.
The interface between anthropology and policy studies offers exciting possibilities,
notwithstanding the methodological and epistemological differences that may divide
these disciplines. Anthropology's main contribution to the study of policy has been
to show how policy processes are embedded in larger social systems, how policies
connect with processes of meaning-making and subjectivity and how policies work in a
political and symbolic sense. Similarly, policy's contribution to anthropology has been to
open up rich new fields of study that not only connect anthropology to other disciplinary
concerns but also to wider public debates. The study of policy places demands on
anthropology which are potentially transformative for the discipline. Policy also offers
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an ideal venue for examining the grounding of global processes in our increasingly
mobile and transnational world (Wedel and Feldman 2005: 1). Anthropology was
traditionally associated with the study of poor, colonized and marginalized people: a
policy perspective takes seriously Nader's call to study up and provides a methodology
for redirecting anthropology's analytical gaze towards the rich, the colonizers and the
powerful.

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