Volume 1 / Athens 1999 by Manos Spyridakis Review of Cris Shore & Susan Wright (eds.), Anthropology of Policy, Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power, London: Routledge, 1997 If anthropology as scientific discipline and practice has emerged via a colonialist necessity, a norm continued up to nowadays under the guise of ethnocentrism, then this volume offers an impressive opportunity for a "role reversal." Namely, it attempts to suggest a new way of analysing the relationship between policies, citizens, and society through the notion of policy. Policy is used as an analytical tool, an exploratory idea for the unfolding of formation processes through which powerful centers have the potential to shape behaviours, knowledge, and ideologies. In other words the study of policy, which is being produced and spread throughout society lies at the heart of the new character anthropological thinking seeks for itself, i.e., the study of the relation between norms and institutions, of ideology and power, of global and local processes, of meaning and interpretation. The concept of policy, in the editors' view, is inextricably linked to that of governance. The latter occupies a special centrality as regards the methodological armory of the book for it refers to complex procedures through which policies affect people's decisions and norms of conduct. It is about handling, guiding, modifying and thus, "correcting" people's representations of themselves and society according to the dominant model. Hence, systems of governance create realities and structure the basis for their acceptance. The relational question, then, which intensively imposes its uneasy essence is why - and the means by which - "citizens are becoming alienated from an increasingly remote and commercialized policy-making process." Up to now the notion of policy and its consequences were taken for granted and treated by social scientists as unchallenged facts existing "out there." What is missing according to the editors is an anthropology for the analysis of complex power systems in Western or Westernized societies. In that sense the sporadically made accounts in the field of so-called political anthropology did not pay full attention to the analysis of modern power systems. This is due to the fact either that they did not explicitly claim to their character, i.e. as political, or they simply considered policy as a given reality, in each case thus involved, unwittingly or not, in a predetermined game of domination. The understanding of policies as political and administrative processes by anthropology leads directly to the fact that the former are inherently anthropological phenomena. In this light policies are themselves nothing but a moving reality, a process under constant making and in dialectical relationship with the subjects they influence. This is so because policies encapsulate ethics, values and conceptions created in the midst of socio-culturally-defined processes. Consequently, policies have the potential to be studied in a number of ways. That is, as systems of meanings, as dominant symbols, as narratives keeping up with existing cultural models, as taxonomic categories defining the modern present or the traditional past, as devices of inclusion and exclusion, as mechanisms of forging identities and separating others. In that sense then a policy-making process incorporates the historically meaningful code of the society that formed it. Policies may also be analysed as examples of what Turner named "dominant symbols," i.e., as analytical keys to grasping a whole cultural system. Thus, the anti-Communist ethic based on McCarthyism as well as the respective version of anti-Americanism in the former Soviet Union during the cold war are realities indicative of the issues challenged under this analytical framework. Both, apart from their political meanings, diffused and imposed ethical and cultural meanings as well: being either communist or capitalist was associated with contagious diseases in both countries and on a different level it constituted the boundaries for the respective national identities. The effectiveness of imposing certain political and cultural ethics, in the authors' view depends on the masking of modern power under the cloak of political neutrality. Thus, the actual political technologies impose definitional realities incorporated by individuals. The latter constitute themselves relying on a given model able to make them to internalise the norms through which they are governed. It follows that a political anthropology has to be concerned with the analysis of the art of government. That is the way political governmentality serves its legitimising function, by objectifying and universalising political decision-making, by creating representational scapegoats, by defining the politically correct behaviours or by giving exemplary types of conduct following the "proper order of things." In that sense, according to the authors, political anthropology is given a new impetus since: a) policy language and discourse provides a key to analysing the architecture of modern power relations; b) the analysis of the relation between governance, policy and subjectivity provides an insight in the ways in which new subjects of power are constituted; and c) the theoretical reserves of political anthropology concerned with micro and macro processes, as these have been formed since the 1970s (Bailey, Barth, Schwartz and Turner, Marxist Anthropologists, Nash, Taussing, Scott, de Certau, to mention but a few), constitute a renewed continuity in this new analytical framework. The analysis of political technologies, apart from constituting a powerful conceptual tool for the exploration of governmental policies, gives new impetus for the reconceptualisation of the notion of anthropological field. Societies are neither remote "islands of history" nor autonomously created formations. The powerful contribution that this book makes is that it puts forward a contextual logic concerning relations of power and systems of governance. It follows that the traditional methodology of participant observation acquires new meaning, as the hot point is not simply to follow an informant's life and writing up notes about it, but to situate the actors among the interactive levels through which the policy process is diffused. In this way, ethnography brings together different organisational and everyday worlds across time and space. The historical background, actual power structure, intended individual strategy, official documents both contemporary and historical, thus, can be studied through and in the process of seeking the power webs and relational activities between actors. This is of great importance for the methodological renewal of anthropology, since the actors are not in danger to be caught in the web of an anthropologically constructed exoticism. By consequence the differential status of social groups as regards their place in the societal hierarchical nexus can be grasped and analysed more easily. To achieve an adequate understanding of the blurred structures created by the political technologies, a Foucauldian method of analysis is suggested based on: a) the examination of "the historically conditioned emergence of new fields of experience" and b) the "re-problematisation", that is an endeavor to distance the shelf from his/her starting point and to reposition oneself far enough from norms and taxonomies which are considered to be the given orthodoxy of his/her own cultural and social background. The suggested redefinition of the "field," although difficult, gives the opportunity to examine how the anthropological discipline is positioned within the hierarchical structure of modern power. From this point of view anthropology has the potential to be the epistemological paradigm for other social sciences as well. The volume begins with an introductory chapter written by both editors where the basic frameworks of the Anthropology of Policy are located. The contributors' articles are situated in four parts: The first part is concerned with "Policy as Language: Discourse and Power." Discourse in the authors' view is a configuration of ideas, which provide the threads out of which ideologies are woven. Thus language is socially constructed and not an autonomous field of inquiry. It follows that an interpretative science is concerned with who has the power to define. All three chapters aim to develop an approach, which shows the different sources that political actors rely upon in order to make their discourse the dominant one. Thus, R.Apthorpe is interested in the writing style of policy documents where language is used more to please than describe the truth. G.Seidel and L.Vidal are concerned with the definition of discourse as such and the way it is used in order to legitimise dominant modes of thinking by excluding other ones. Their paradigm is based on the discourses ("medico-moral" and "culturalist") about HIV and AIDS in Africa. H.P.Hansen concerns himself with the highlighting of conflicting interpretations of doctors, patients, and nurses about a hospital's policy on the definition and treatment of the sick body. The second part refers to" Policy as Cultural Agent." All chapters explore the attempt made by the state to formulate and impose a certain national identity in different ethnographic settings: Canada, Sweden, and the E.U. E.Mackey shows how the Canadian government tries to disguise its own involvement in supposedly authentic initiatives celebrating Canadian identity. Likewise, A.Rabo shows how Swedish government by using keywords like gender equality or a laisser-faire model of society, disguises internal contradictions and inequalities. C.Shore analysing the European Commission's directive about "Television Without Frontiers" shows how political elites use policy as an instrument for the constitution of large-scale identities. The third part refers to "Policy as Political Technology: Governmentality and Subjectivity." This section examines more deeply the use of policy as a Trojan Horse for the imposition of neo-liberal orthodoxy of governance, as well as how new forms of behavior are internalised and adopted by actors. H.Vike is concerned with recasting a political issue in the neutral terminology of science as regards policy for the elderly care in the Norwegian context. B.Hyatt examines the housing policies of British conservative governments and how this represents a shift towards a more individual model of social organisation, a "technology of the self." E.Martin analyses the way rationalities of governance encapsulate representational pictures of how actors are related to each other, with government and themselves. The final part of the book written by H.Donnan and G.Macfarlane is the concluding remark of this new conceptual approach by representing and criticising the contribution of anthropology to policy research in the ethnographic location of N.Ireland. The new ideas deposited in this book might prove a useful analytical device towards intrepretational anthropology. By linking several levels of actions affecting and, most of all, shaping organisational views and universes, the exploration of the political technologies employed by center of powers, manages in great part to avoid the slippery path of anthropological self criticism, namely, scientific introversion. Moreover, it gives great impetus to renewing the methodological steps of the discipline by simultaneously incorporating an inter-scientific approach as regards the "object" of inquiry, proving both the scientific flexibility and the methodological dynamics of the discipline this attempt comes from. Return to Top