Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Education

Surveillance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:21:46 +0000

Activists from No CCTV stage a 2013 anti-surveillance protest in Birmingham. Photo by Brett Wilde.

Vita Peacock Mikkel Kenni Bruun Claire Elisabeth Dungey Matan Shapiro

King's College London

Initially published 5 Dec 2023

Abstract:

Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or reversed. Surveillance can take place from above (‘panoptic’) but also laterally (‘synoptic’), or from below (‘sousveillance’). Indeed, in the field of human relationships it is not always apparent who is watching who. Because of the vast range of human response to being monitored, surveillance infrastructures—particularly when implemented at scale—often do so within moral discourses that are regionally specific, and vital to their legitimacy.

The field of surveillance studies has extensively explored surveillance as a mode of security and policing, and this emphasis has shaped early anthropological engagements with the subject. With the growth of computerisation, surveillance has become more relevant to a variety of other ethnographic contexts. Digital monitoring now plays an expanding role in forms of care, public and private health, communication, and the management of work, in which the harvesting of data for profit always remains a near or distant possibility. An emerging ‘anthropology of surveillance’ invites us to consider not only conditions of visibility, but also their perpetual relation to what is not seen. Here the moral question is not whether surveillance itself is good or bad, but how and why are human beings rendered visible through technology, and under which circumstances do they seek to remain opaque?

Introduction

In its popular form, surveillance often connotes a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Significantly inflected by George Orwell’s parable of totalitarianism, 1984 ([1949] 1990), in which citizens are watched and listened to at all times through telescreens, this imaginary surfaces at moments of social tension around new intersections between power and information collection. In scholarship, this connotation was given a paradigmatic and enduring shape by Michel Foucault’s influential text Discipline and punish ([1975] 2019). In it, Foucault introduces the image of the Panopticon: a series of architectural designs by English reformer Jeremy Bentham for controlling the behaviour of their occupants through the suggestion that they were being observed (Galič, Timan and Koops 2016). The Panopticon was at once an actual historical phenomenon as well as a theory for the coercive effects that could be exerted over human beings through practices of unequal exposure, and it was in the latter sense that the image shaped the field of surveillance studies. The ‘panoptic’ paradigm of the 1980s and 90s theorised how new technologies were reinscribing old asymmetrical relationships between observer and observed, while a subsequent ‘post-panoptic’ paradigm (Deleuze 1992) explored how surveillance has become multi-directional and mobile, with overlapping state and capitalist incentives (Bauman and Lyon 2013; Zuboff 2019).

‘Surveillance’ is a modern word that has been increasingly used in English from the nineteenth century onwards. An anglicisation of the French surveiller—to watch (veiller) over (sur)—both the English and the French derive from the Latin verb vigilare, to keep watch. As a concept, surveillance has been defined many times with different connotations in different scholarly traditions. A particularly influential definition describes surveillance as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, 14). In anthropology, however, a focus on the ‘personal’ is problematised by how the very concept of the person varies historically and culturally (Carrithers 1985; Strathern 2018). Therefore, in anthropology, another definition of surveillance is worth pursuing: watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose. This lays more emphasis on an understanding of ‘technology’ which, following the French tradition in which Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were operating (Behrent 2013), derives from the French techniques. Conceived broadly as a set of practices, techniques include material culture but are not limited to it. These encompass social activities like guarding, spying, or undercover policing, as well as the use of analogue or digital devices to collect, store, or process information.

Anthropology has been a relative latecomer to the study of surveillance. This may be partly because it entails naming a relationship as surveillance, while anthropologists may prioritise other definitions. In this growing body of work, however, anthropologists have analysed surveillance as a technology of state security, policing, and capitalist accumulation. They have also shown that within these instantiations lie possibilities for political reciprocity and reversal, for dynamics of care, and for a reappropriation of technology (known as ‘function creep’) from above and beneath. As a way of making visible, surveillance is also in continual conversation with non-surveillance: whether through invisibility, anonymity, or concealment. In general, an emerging anthropology of surveillance considers the unfolding of relationships among and between ‘surveillors’ and ‘surveillands’ as a situated encounter. This encounter draws on historically constituted categories, relationships, and moral orders, in which it finds—or fails to find—its own legitimacy. As the proliferation of computing continues to enable the expansion of surveillance, anthropology invites attention to the conditions of visibility, and the purposes to which rendering subjects visible through technology is put.

Security, policing, and morality

A conversation across the social sciences began to take shape in the 1980s and 90s in response to the growing use of electronic monitoring in Europe and North America (Bogard 1996; Gandy 1993; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 1994; Marx 1988; Norris and Armstrong 1999; Whitaker 1999). Scholars in the emerging field of surveillance studies were concerned with how new forms of information-gathering were transforming existing social institutions, particularly the police. Anthropologists entered this field from the side sometime later by way of a burgeoning interest in security (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Goldstein 2010; Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014; Maguire and Low 2019).

Seen broadly as the promise of protection against some real or imagined existential threat, surveillance has been observed as an outcome of wider dynamics of securitisation that have intensified since the events of 9/11. In European airports, for example, increasing counter-terrorism measures have entailed new intersections between human and machine surveillance (Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014). Assessing the threat of would-be passengers, machine-screening of physiological clues operates alongside the ‘skilled vision’ of security personnel—an intuitive technique gained through experience (Grasseni 2007, cited in Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014, 127). The surveillance that is justified by a logic of security can be prone to a function creep that goes well beyond its overt purpose (Frois 2019; Maguire 2009). In Egyptian-ruled Gaza between 1948-67, police surveillance served not only to protect the Palestinian population from threat, but also to enforce its own standards of propriety in gender relations, or to inhibit residents from joining dissident organisations (Feldman 2015).

In the context of security, surveillance is often intended to produce effects on the affective and mental life of the surveilled. Foucault emphasised the capacity of surveillance to render a self-regulated conformity to established rules, a phenomenon now referred to by journalists and privacy activists as ‘chilling effects’. Yet self-regulation is one of a panoply of responses that the idea of being watched may yield. Among the most common is a generalised suspicion of others, bred by the uncertainty of whether one is really being watched or not, which can spiral into paranoia (Masco 2017; Verdery 2018). For instance, in left-wing radical activism, the potential for undercover police surveillance can produce distrust of fellow activists that can inhibit the development of solidarity (Krøijer 2015). Sometimes cause-and-effect happens in an inverse way, as when certain affects, particularly fear, are mobilised at scale by media producers to justify the need for more surveillance (Masco 2014; Massumi 2015). But not all experienced affects are negative, and, in some contexts, surveillance may indeed deliver the feeling of security that it promises (Feldman 2015).

As a modality of security and policing, surveillance enables control over a bounded space (Levin, Frohne and Weibel 2002; Frois 2013; Maguire and Low 2019). Often this is commensurate with the territoriality of the state, in which national borders become sites of heightened surveillance, historically through an alliance of sensory and documentary forms (Baĭburin 2021; Breckenridge and Szreter 2012), which are increasingly automated through cameras, scanners, and biometric databases (Breckenridge 2014; Boe and Mainsah 2021). Sometimes it is internal boundaries within states that matter. In predominantly Alevi working-class neighbourhoods in Turkey, spatial control is achieved through a mixture of identity checks and interrogations at entrances, alongside the perambulation of armoured vehicles and undercover police inside the neighbourhood (Yonucu 2022). Here, surveillance becomes a tool of spatial isolation to keep outsiders out and residents in. As surveillance becomes increasingly digitalised, the question arises over whether its traditional production of spatial enclosure is substituted for a diffuse ‘digital enclosure’ (Andrejevic 2007), where access is mediated through data stored in distributed drives. In the Xinjiang province of China, interoperability between facial recognition systems at security checkpoints with other forms of data collection segregates speed and access to space in real time, as Han residents move frictionlessly while Uyghur residents may be detained and diverted (Byler 2021). Yet even in the digital enclosure the question of spatiality never completely disappears.

Surveillance may be less a matter of observation than of ‘sorting’ populations (Gandy 1993; Bowker and Star 1999). In the context of security and policing, though the effects may be experienced individually, it may not be specific people but rather categories of people who are placed under suspicion. Among CCTV operatives in Britain in the 1990s and 2000s, subjects of interest frequently fell into raced, gendered, classed, aged, and other demographic categories (Goold 2004; Norris and Armstrong 1999). In Kenya, China, or the US, falling into the category of ‘Muslim’ may be sufficient to constitute a police suspect (Al-Bulushi 2021; Ali 2018; Byler 2021). This association between surveillance and sorting is deeply rooted in the colonial past and is carried into the present through digital media (Jefferson 2020; Udupa and Dattatreyan 2023). The institution of the census across the former British Empire is a case in point (Breckenridge 2014; S. Browne 2015; Rao and Nair 2019). Processes of registering and categorising were normally linked to forms of identification that determined the ambit of a person’s movement. Among these was the slave pass of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, which combined with differently mediated forms of surveillance to racialise certain bodies and render them legible as property (S. Browne 2015). These categories do not necessarily fall, however, along religious or racial lines. Anthropologists themselves have fallen into categories of suspicion throughout the discipline’s history (Sökefeld and Strasser 2016): whether as communists in the US (Price 2004), or as foreign agents in the former Socialist states (Sampson 2022; Verdery 2012, 2018).

Although the surveillance performed by human and machine agents of the state continually seeks to solve the problem of large datasets by classification and sorting (Bowker and Star 1999), there is normally a much messier and more complex picture that exists on the ground or behind the scenes of any state surveillance project (Frois 2013; Jacobsen and Rao 2018). On the ‘friendly’ border between India and Bangladesh, curious political reversals occur between the Indian border soldiers, lonely and far from home, and the women and men seeking to carry contraband across the border. While the military officers enact the authority of the state’s surveilling gaze, they are also subject to a ‘counter-gaze’ by these travellers, scanning for vulnerabilities or openness to illicit transactions (Ghosh 2019, 447). Not only might the gaze be met and even directed by a possible counter-gaze, but the act of being surveilled by the state may in some contexts be a conduit through which the state becomes aware of political grievances and acts on them. This happened routinely in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, when grassroots complaints about the lack of currency in circulation led to behind-the-scenes instructions for banks to produce more (Feldman 2015) .

This leads to an aspect of surveillance that anthropology is well placed to address: namely, the ways in which monitoring technologies are introduced within moral discourses essential to their appropriation and acceptance. When video surveillance was installed in public areas in Portugal, it was driven by an apparent need to modernise the country to become more like its northern European counterparts (Frois 2013). In this discourse, surveillance becomes commensurate with development, an association that can be witnessed more widely. The most prominent example of this is India’s Aadhaar system, the largest biometric identity project in human history (Nair 2021; Rao and Nair 2019). Fingerprints, iris scans, and other physiological information are collected alongside demographic details, which are matched to the holy grail of any mass surveillance project: the unique identifier (Clarke 1988), in this case a twelve-digit number. From its inception, Aadhaar has been rationalised through its provision of multiple goods (access to welfare, financial inclusion, digital literacy, and accessibility among others) and its elimination of undesirable phenomena such as poverty, corruption, and fraud. Yet for critics, Aadhaar constitutes the infrastructure for the biggest surveillance apparatus ever implemented. This antithesis touches on a paradox of modernity itself, that the history of surveillance is entwined with the history of the state and its capacity to institutionalise care on a very large scale (Dandeker 1990; Higgs 2003). In the UK, for example, the foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) was also the foundation of an information apparatus that could serve other ends (Rule 1973). The question, for any citizen, is that of reward for their enforced visibility. Are Indian citizens really being compensated by Aadhaar, or is this the final frontier in the state’s appropriation of the citizen’s body (Kapila 2022)?

Health surveillance and care

Surveillance is often justified through the interests of the common good, such as safeguarding those deemed to be vulnerable, caring for patients, or stopping the spread of disease. While health monitoring, in this logic, may be enacted as a ‘caring’ practice (Mol 2008), it now increasingly involves the collection of data stored on servers that are not always known to those who are being monitored (Sandvik 2020; Lyon 2021). Health surveillance is commonly defined as the systemic collection, analysis, and dissemination of health data for the implementation and evaluation of public health action (Choi 2012).^[1] In more general terms, it can be understood as the practice of watching over health, from the perceived ‘health’ of populations and individuals to that of communities and nations.

Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated health surveillance as a matter of political and public concern (Kim and Chung 2021). Political responses to the pandemic were shaped by a range of moral rationalities that introduced and justified new modes of public health surveillance (Lyon 2021). Public health interventions across the world sought to control and mitigate the outbreak, such as by responsibilising citizens to act in the interest of the state and to install contact tracing apps to curb infection rates. In places such as Germany and the UK, state-sponsored contact tracing apps received media criticism due to privacy concerns, as well as technical concerns over their ability to act as a public health measure (Laptander and Vitebsky 2021).

Monitoring populations for the purpose of controlling and caring for citizens is not a new phenomenon. It was partly through shifting modes of governance in Europe from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, with the monitoring of populations and publics, that practices of health surveillance took shape. Health surveillance has therefore historically played a key role in constituting not only visible, measurable, and governable spaces, but also governable persons willing to self-monitor in the name of their own health (Foucault 1973; Rose 1989). In many parts of the world, the provision of public health services, including their administration and governance, have become increasingly digitalised through practices of ‘datafication’ in which the mass collection of personal health data informs interventions (Hoeyer, Bauer and Pickersgill 2019; Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017). Surveillance, in this vein, unfolds through a range of monitoring practices that claim to sustain human life in different ways. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, health surveillance can thus be seen to form part of a ‘politics of life itself’ (Rose 2006), in which bodies and minds have become ‘vital’ objects of observation and intervention. Such practices rely on people’s capacity and willingness to engage in forms of everyday self-monitoring in the service of care (Weiner et al. 2020; Kent, Lupton and Zeena 2020).

In surveillance studies, care and control have been described as two entangled interests driving practices of monitoring. Watching over children, for instance, may be intended with their protection in mind but can also be motivated by other intentions, such as direction and control (Lyon 2003; Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). In many contexts, people actively participate in the monitoring of their bodies but in ways that are not always known to them. In rural India, for example, the ‘Khushi baby necklace’, a tracking device presented as a piece of jewellery, was trialled as a digital tool of recording and storing immunisation records (Sandvik 2020). More recently, it was also used to collect other health data such as HIV medication records. Developers attempted to make it locally ‘appropriate’, designing it with a black thread to ward off evil spirits, showing how such technologies are incorporated within cosmological systems (Sandvik 2020). While the necklace can be seen as ‘doing good’—as a caring technology—digital health data also has the potential to be exploited and commodified without people’s consent or knowledge in the service of corporate interests.

Dynamics of care and control were simultaneously at work in the 1950s, when a team of doctors brought an antibiotic to the Navajo population in Arizona to treat tuberculosis (Jones 2001). When patients failed to take their medications, healthcare professionals regarded them as non-compliant, and responded by implementing powerful technologies of surveillance: random tests were performed, such as urine testing or radioactive pill clocks^[2], often without patients being informed about their purposes. These interventions introduced distrust into doctor-patient relationships and many feared participating as the urine sample testing could potentially expose their ceremonial use of the peyote plant, which had been prohibited by the tribal council. In this case, medical surveillance as a tool of control was operating within existing political structures of colonisation and racialisation, and it is unclear what opportunities the Navajo had, if any, to resist these medical interventions.

Health technologies are sometimes welcomed and appropriated in new ways beyond the way they were intended (Stadler 2021). Digital health technologies of surveillance, such as the MERM (‘medication event reminder monitoring’) device, have been introduced to persuade and remind ‘non-compliant’ tuberculosis or HIV patients to take their medications. Some patients referred to the device as ‘the box’, whereas others gave it affectionate nicknames such as ‘my child’, which one user explained was due to the box containing pills that would give her access to a healthy life. Some stored their boxes safely for this reason, or wore clothes that would match the box, hence trying to transform it from an adherence-monitoring device to a person-entity that represented hope.

Health surveillance technologies have often been used as mechanisms of governance, but it is important to emphasise that people might actively use monitoring technologies in the name of improving their own health or in the interest of looking after others. The past two decades have seen an intensive proliferation of, and investment in, digital monitoring technologies that claim to improve our physical and mental health, as well as offer care and support for others (Lupton 2016; Neff and Nafus 2016; Ajana, Braga and Guidi 2022). For example, physical rehabilitation apps can monitor exercises done at home (Schwennesen 2019), and smartphone apps and ‘wearables’ can be used to track children’s locations (Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). Self-monitoring in the context of health can therefore foreground more intimate and subtler aspects of monitoring effected by everyday acts of self-surveillance. Wearable self-tracking technologies such as Fitbit and Apple Watch enable people to monitor a range of activities and functions associated with their bodies and minds. These practices might include tracking exercise and steps (Brüggen and Schober 2020), menstrual cycles (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021), heart rates, and sleeping patterns (Hardey 2022). Digital wearables also increasingly allow people to report on, quantify, and monitor various ‘mental and emotional’ experiences and sensations, from stress and anxiety to mindful moments and other perceived states of well-being (Gregory and Bowker 2016; Schüll 2016; Davies 2017; Minozzo 2022).

Self-monitoring emerges here as a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, such as in the management and understanding of pain, affects, and medical uncertainties. For example, health monitoring technologies can figure as practices of self-knowledge in the hands of menstruating people, as an ethnography of period tracking apps in the context of the FemTech^[3] wave in the US describes (Ford et al 2021). Yet these health tracking apps can also be situated and critiqued within a political frame of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019) that raises concerns about the ethics of data sharing and its potentially discriminatory ends, such as limited access to healthcare services (e.g., abortion). For example, one user in favour of menstrual tracking but critical of the harvesting of personal data describes her circumstance as a ‘no-exit situation’ wherein one just tries to ‘limit the damage’ of self-tracking in the face of corporate profit-making (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 59). While users are ‘empowered within conditions not of their choosing’ (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 58), Andrea Ford and her colleagues argue that self-monitoring nevertheless offers a way for women to recognise, and in turn exercise, a mode of control over affective and bodily experiences that have been historically, and are still routinely, neglected in healthcare systems.

Within circumstances of what is now commonly termed ‘digital health’, the use of self-monitoring technology constitutes the very body-self it assumes: subjects that are capable of self-checking and self-reporting (Bruun 2023). The notion of the reflexive, measurable, and quantifiable self is in many ways built into the design and operation of health trackers, which in turn shapes users’ experiential realities of what it means to be ‘healthy’, ‘fit’, and ‘well’. Digital self-monitoring can thus be seen to constitute new caring and corporeal capacities that can be extended to self and others (see e.g. Davies 2017; Bergroth 2019; Kent 2023). Yet these new modes of monitoring demand that we constantly ‘watch our selves’ in ways that construe people as objects of self-observation and self-inspection in pursuit of particular health goods.

Monitoring labour

Labour has always gone hand-in-hand with some form of surveillance—whether understood as such, or in the more benign language of monitoring or supervision. Because employers have legitimate goods to protect, for instance regulatory compliance or productivity, surveillance is often accepted by employees as a ‘taken-for-granted’ element of working life (Ball 2010, 19). How this takes place, however, varies greatly according to historical, regional, and technological conditions. In anthropological terms, there are certain analytical points to consider. The first is whether the surveillance in question is happening through social relationships or is construed as abstract from relationships. Both can occur through old and new forms of mediation. On the former side, overseers, foremen, drivers, or other figures to monitor or coerce workers extend deep into the history of agricultural and industrial economies (R.M. Browne 2024; Thompson 1967), and persist in the present through forms of in-person or camera-enabled visual supervision. On the latter side, technologies of quantification developed in the early twentieth century through Frederick Taylor’s principles of ‘scientific management’ (Taylor [1911] 1993), which incentivised workers to manage themselves, and are evolving in some contexts into what is known as ‘algorithmic management’. In addition, because some form of surveillance is an accepted part of working life, it plays a more-than-usual role in constituting working life, communicating to workers—like a ‘paralanguage’ (Ball 2010, 97)—about what tasks are valued. Lastly, because the workplace is a peculiarly purposeful setting, the increase of digital surveillance in recent years appears to be transforming these domains at the highest pace, as new configurations between work and non-working life are negotiated, new ethical norms around personal information tested, and new working identities made.

In examining the nature of monitoring at work, anthropologists have looked towards their own institutions. Higher education reforms across the world in the 1980s and 90s transformed monitoring in the academy, as part of a wider shift in public institutions more generally, towards external auditing (Born 2004; Harper 1998; Strathern 2000b). Financial concepts were imported to assess academics and their work in terms of ‘outputs’, ‘impact’, and ‘efficiency’—using much of the language developed by Taylor—in ways that supplanted older social and qualitative forms of evaluation. While the new regime of ‘audit culture’ was coercive to the extent that there was no opt-out (Strathern 2000a), and academics became compelled to monitor themselves and each other in quantifiable, ends-orientated, and often labour-intensive ways, it also became constitutive, to some extent, of academic work and workers. Departments and universities were collectivised as subjects of surveillance into the bodies in which they were assessed; meanwhile, some academics learned to refer to themselves using the terminology of the ‘h-index’, the ‘i-index’, or the numerical values of audit criteria, as these became avenues for promotion or job security (Shore and Wright 2000; Lazar 2022). As a form of bureaucratic surveillance, audit or ‘metric culture’ (Ajana 2018) functions like bureaucracy more generally, effacing its own political basis (Ferguson 1994; see also Bear and Mathur 2015). One of the ways in which anthropologists have critiqued these developments is by reinscribing this politics through acts of extra-institutional writing. In this, they dovetail with a wider phenomenon in workplace surveillance, when workers turn to anonymous blogs, forums, Facebook, or WhatsApp groups beyond the surveilled domain, to forge critical identities and find workarounds (Ball 2010; Lazar 2022).

Surveillance scholars have observed the gendering of surveillance relations in some labour contexts, as women perform before a mediated male gaze (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Meulen and Heynen 2016). Anthropologists examining care work, which is disproportionately gendered female, have encountered the increasing use of surveillance technologies (Johnson 2015; Glaser 2021). Here, gender asymmetries frequently intersect with class and ethnic asymmetries, dynamics all being remediated through location tracking and CCTV, among others. In Hong Kong, for example, migrant Filipino women are employed by high- to middle-income families to care for children and perform domestic chores, labour that is increasingly scrutinised through so-called ‘nanny cams’ (Johnson et al 2020). Because of the informal nature of much of this work, the use of surveillance can also be less formal, as workers are not told in advance that they would be filmed, nor where and for how long the data would be stored. In some cases, they report discovering hidden cameras in the process of cleaning, or being called to task for activities that could only have been observed remotely—only realising in hindsight their exposure to a male employer. To avoid these gazes, they might respond tactically by ‘accidentally’ dropping their cleaning cloths on the lens or spending more time in unmonitored areas like the bathroom. In care settings, the presence of surveillance technologies can interrupt or even substitute for care itself and thus jeopardise important wells of trust. On the other hand, they may also manufacture it, as hours of labour that would have otherwise gone unrecorded are captured on camera for their employer to see.

While surveillance happens at work, it can itself be a form of labour and subject to the imperatives that shape labour: namely, a drive towards automation and outsourcing to reduce costs. It is in this context that labour monitoring is increasingly taking place through enhanced forms of datafication and algorithmic management. This can be understood as an extension of scientific management, to the extent that algorithmic management involves a calculation of time and resources needed for tasks (Lazar 2022), such as picking up a box in an Amazon warehouse or delivering meals across a city. However, this form of monitoring also greatly reduces the presence of employed overseers. In these new constellations, surveillance becomes ‘multimodal’, assembling mathematical calculations, customer ratings and reviews, and a small number of human dispatchers or ‘rider captains’ who play a supporting role in the work of overseeing (Newlands 2021, 725). Though these new relations are sometimes represented as replacing ‘bosses’ with algorithms, anthropologically it is more accurate to think of these as ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems that depend much more heavily on computing (Newlands 2021, 724). If a food delivery driver does not have access to a functioning smartphone, not only are they unsupervised, but they cannot work at all (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023). With these techno-orientated systems arrive new technical vulnerabilities, as well as new possibilities for worker reappropriation or resistance. Some Deliveroo drivers in Brussels, for example, found ways to ‘hack’ the employee app to circumvent the performance score system (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023), while truckers in the US have applied a number of methods to ‘beat the box’ of newly installed Electronic Logging Devices, for instance by covering GPS masts with tinfoil or shattering their interiors with a rubber hammer (Levy 2022). Despite the social and legal risks that emerge from the rise of ‘smart’ surveillance in workplaces, because of the role of capital incentives this area looks set to expand, particularly with the growth of generative AI (Ball 2022; Duke 2023).

Participatory surveillance

Social vigilance, understood in the broadest sense, has long been a subject of anthropological inquiry. During the first half of the twentieth century, some anthropologists construed ritual action as a matter of ‘watching over others’ (Bateson [1936] 1958; Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993; Leach [1964] 1970). For example, the Azande of central Africa conducted divination ceremonies to ‘see’ and expose suspected witches (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993). Similarly, ‘bewitchment talk’ in the French Bocage, or rural Normandy, included secret malicious spells or even the transfer of ‘power’ through gazes, causing serious misfortune in the lives of those affected (Favret-Saada 1980). Consequently, bewitchment in the Bocage sustained a pervasive sense of fear and suspicion, which intensified and at times escalated the constant monitoring of social rivalries in the village.

Neighbours, spouses, kinsfolk, and peers all frequently and regularly engage in vigilant behaviour as part of ordinary life. For example, self-presentation in different social contexts is often based on the monitoring of others’ behaviour and the ‘alignment’ of one’s own behaviour with the expectations of others (Goffman [1963] 1990). Similarly, the spread of gossip and rumour in an English council estate was used to limit the level of prestige that people could gain in the community (Gluckman 1963). Yet, gossip can also serve to build prestige. Some women in the Polynesian Nukulaelae Atoll, for example, may use gossip to reinstate broken social hierarchies, resist negative stigma, and negotiate power imbalances (Besnier 2019). In all these cases, mundane monitoring is a ubiquitous form of social control involving the relational negotiation of reputation and respectability.

The advent of social media has taken these monitorial negotiations into new territories. Practices of ‘lateral surveillance’ (Andrejevic 2004) are an integral aspect of peer-to-peer monitoring in online social worlds. Lateral surveillance can be imagined as surveillance that is enacted in many directions simultaneously, including ‘sideways’, as opposed to the linear ‘top-down’ monitoring famously associated with the Panopticon.^[4] Contrarily, lateral monitoring sometimes produces an empowering process of identity construction, of which surveillance is an important positive element (Koskela 2018). Since the ability to ‘follow’ others is intrinsic to the exchange of information on social platforms, users actively take part in practices of mutual surveillance (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen 2013). On Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or TikTok, for example, online users voluntarily enable others to monitor their accounts in different ways, including the ability to download and share their photos, locate them geographically, or track their whereabouts (Trottier 2013). While social media acquires distinctive characteristics in different social contexts, these forms of sharing and mutual exposure are basic communicational features that enable rather than restrict dialogue (Miller 2011; see also Widlok 2021). The term ‘participatory surveillance’ (Albrechtslund 2008) highlights the customary rather than coercive nature of such practices.

One important feature of participatory surveillance is its ‘synoptic’ nature: an inversion of Bentham’s Panopticon, the concept of the ‘synopticon’ refers to surveillance of the few by the many (Mathiesen 1997). Unlike the linear, demarcated, and clearly defined form of control produced in panoptic realities, power in synoptic realities is dispersed across society in multiple directions.^[5] One of the consequences of a synoptic reality is that individuals can profit from the monitoring of their own lives. At the end of the 1990s, ‘everyday surveillance’ became linked to new flows of capital in the emergent online market economy so that, for example, a college student in the US could instal a webcam in her apartment and charge subscription fees from internet users for viewing access (Staples 2013). Over the past two decades, ‘web-camming’ has become a lucrative business in the online sex industry (Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018). While such sites as Only Fans operate under little or no ethical regulation, they continue to thrive (Stegeman 2021). Rather than initiating traditional ‘top-down’ publicity campaigns, which target vast numbers of potential customers through mass visibility, commercial companies increasingly hire social media influencers, YouTubers, or vloggers to recommend products and services to their followers (Lange 2019). In this process, the companies behind these products also gain access to the followers’ data (see Clarke 1988 on ‘dataveillance’), thus complicating the notion of synoptic surveillance as purely lateral.

Participatory surveillance does, however, include a ‘vertical’ dimension, in the sense that people can monitor the authorities ‘bottom up’. For example, civil society ‘watchdogs’, non-military use of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques (wherein civil society actors identify crimes or human rights abuses [see Trottier 2015]), and smartphone apps that enable drivers to detect speeding cameras, all invert the ‘top-down’ monitoring used by those in power. The term ‘sousveillance’ (from French sous, ‘from below’) characterises this form of monitoring (Mann, Nolan and Wellman 2003). While surveillance may convey the idea of the omnipresent, overarching gaze, sousveillance indicates grassroots resistance to state or corporate monitoring powers by which people attempt to defy and deter potential privacy infringements (Garrido 2015). Sousveillance is not antithetical to synoptic surveillance, however. CCTV gadgets, recording devise, and mobile tracking applications can all be used ‘laterally’ to document or monitor peers at work, at home, or in public spaces (Lyon 2007).

Both in its synoptic (lateral) and sousveillant (vertical) manifestations, participatory surveillance now seems commonplace. Depending on the mundane settings in which it is being implemented, this sense of immanent and constant surveillance could blur the distinctions between those who monitor and the subjects of monitoring. In some digital contexts, every person is turned into an observer who must assume that they are simultaneously always being observed. Participatory surveillance thereby prompts fresh discussions about power and sovereignty, visibility and opacity, as well as the role of individual and collective agency, in a world characterised by ubiquitous surveillance.

Non-surveillance

Any anthropology of surveillance must reckon with its inverse and counterpart: non-surveillance. Non-surveillance can be understood as the broad spectrum of individual and collective activities that seek to resist or reimagine visibility before a surveilling authority. This frequently takes on a moral force. In a world where even deserts are technologically monitored, their sands mapped by satellites and scanned by drones, the idea of anonymity has become a value around which new kinds of collectives have gathered (Anon Collective 2021; Coleman 2014; Comité invisible 2009). One of the most renown is the Anonymous movement, in which participants could be identified by the wearing of homogenous Guy Fawkes masks. In Britain, becoming ‘Anonymous’ paradoxically became a strategy of hyper-visible protest, in order to oppose an invisibilisation by the state enacted through the discourse of austerity (Peacock n.d.). Indeed, any reflection on surveillance in relation to the state soon upends any straightforward moral binary between surveillance and non-surveillance (Birchall 2021). If making their citizenry legible is an essential part of the state’s capacity to enable them to live, its obverse allows the state to let others die (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Deliberate forms of ‘looking away’ from people on the margins (Kalir and Schendel 2017), such as migrants and refugees passing through or around national borders, permit these polities to absolve themselves of duties of care (Yarbakhsh 2018).

It can be argued that these dynamics of revelation and concealment lie at the very heart of the anthropological enterprise (Göpfert 2020). Ethnography, anthropology’s flagship method, involves forms of data collection through technologies that can, and have been, compared to surveillance. As she examines the eleven-volume file collected on her by the Romanian Security Services (Securitate) in the 1970s and 80s, Katharine Verdery asks herself, ‘When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that as Securitate officers do? Isn’t this part of the critique of my discipline that likens it to a colonial practice?’ (2018, 18). These existential doubts about anthropology are important to address^[6] (cf. Boas [1919] 2005; Price 2016), and one response is to return to our opening statements: that what matters are the conditions and purposes in and for which human subjects become visible through ethnography. In the 1930s, Bronislaw Malinowski advocated for the creation of a ‘nation-wide surveillance network’ through forms of mass ethnographic observation (1938), which would address the ills of society. Similarly, for other anthropologists, refusing to collect or include information that could serve structures of domination becomes a political act (Price 2011; Simpson 2014; Yonucu 2022). The questions that anthropologists often ask themselves are those that must also be asked of surveillance: how are human beings becoming visible through monitoring technologies, and why?

Conclusion

The anthropology of surveillance is a relatively new area of inquiry that looks set to expand as relations that can be named as surveillance do. Anthropology has the potential to demonstrate the social and cultural complexity of these relationships as historically constituted ways of seeing interact with new technologies. While public discourses may continue to express alarm at the growth of ‘Orwellian’ societies, it is worth remembering that 1984 was written partly in protest at new forms of identification in Britain that came to underpin the NHS (Higgs 2003). Anthropology shows us that it is the social projects around monitoring, whether large or small, that define what the qualities of these relationships are.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article draws was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 947867).

Note on contributors

Vita Peacock is an anthropologist in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and PI on the ERC project: Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain (SAMCOM) (2021 – 2025). She is an affiliate member of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5645-3242

Vita Peacock, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. vita.peacock@kcl.ac.uk

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London. He currently researches health surveillance and digital self-monitoring in Britain, as part of the SAMCOM project. He also teaches medical anthropology at Cambridge University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book titled Towards an anthropology of psychology. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1814-294X

Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

Claire Elisabeth Dungey is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London and currently researches the relationship between surveillance, care and family life in Germany, as part of the SAMCOM project. Her research interests cover the anthropology of childhood and education, mobility and future aspirations. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1432-9096

Claire Elisabeth Dungey, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. claire.dungey@kcl.ac.uk. Claire is also honorary fellow at Durham University: claire.e.dungey@durham.ac.uk

Matan Shapiro is an anthropologist currently working as a research associate in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, as part of the SAMCOM project. He studies how the practice of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and related forms of monitoring help shape new online spaces of moral consent. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2655-7467

Matan Shapiro, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. matan.shapiro@kcl.ac.uk

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[1] The World Health Organization (WHO) defines public health surveillance as ‘the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data.’ World Health Organization. 2023. “Surveillance.” https://www.who.int/emergencies/surveillance. Accessed 23 March 2023.

[2] A radioactive pill clock was a cylindrical block drilled with a number of holes that could hold a daily supply of pills. The pill clock had a cover that allowed the removal of only one set of pills at a time. A patient would rotate the device and remove the daily pills. Yet it was unknown to the patient that the device had a small piece of photographic film and a radioactive emitter embedded in plastic that could determine time intervals and hence a patient’s irregularity.

[3] FemTech, short for ‘female [health] technology’, is a fast-growing women’s health movement in the digital health industry and beyond. The term was coined in 2016 by the Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin, co-founder of the period-tracking app, ‘Clue’.

[4] The term ‘lateral’ should not be taken literally as 'sideways'. Instead, the idea of ‘lateral surveillance’ involves looking around in all directions and being able to survey peers as much as subordinates or superiors. Within this perspective, which is endemic to any form of participatory surveillance, there is little qualified difference between lateral, synoptic and sous-veillance, all of which express the same fluidity as a response to the relative rigidity of Foucault's analysis.

[5] Thomas Mathiesen attributes this to the emergent construction of new moral sensibilities involving three types of synoptic surveillance techniques: 1) the ability to see everything (‘syn-opticism’); 2) the ability to make everything visible (‘syn-omorphism’); and 3) the ability to communicate information (‘syn-noetics’). When these elements are combined, he argued, power can be produced, diffused, and obtained in unexpected ways.

[6] Price, David. 2000. “Anthropologists as spies.” The Nation, November 2. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/anthropologists-spies/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Literacy

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 03:45:18 +0000

Mark Turin Robert Hanks

University of British Columbia

Initially published 2 Dec 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21literacy

Abstract:

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept.

Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education.

Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.

Introduction

Literacy is such a central part of most people’s everyday lives that its ubiquity can be taken for granted. Scholars have highlighted how, for many of us, literacy represents an essential pathway to development and personal liberation that has the power to cure almost any social ill (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Street 1997: 49; Ong 2012). Literacy is often presented as an ability with such transformative potential that becoming literate leads to a fundamental redefinition of an individual’s identity (Riemer 2008; Ahearn 2004). However, there are communities for whom literacy can be a less integral, sometimes even inappropriate, means for documenting and communicating language (Debenport 2015). In circumventing the constraints of the written word, such communities seek alternative ways of transmitting ideas, both orally and through other technologies (Finnegan 2012; Turin et al. 2013). Considering the perceived centrality of literacy to most contemporary human societies, and its continued absence from others, how has anthropology contributed to a cross-cultural understanding of literacy?

Broadly defined as both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been characterised as communication through an invented system of visually decoded signs, rather than by oral or gestural modes (Besnier 1999: 141). As an area of interest, literacy has figured prominently in anthropological inquiry since the discipline’s inception, as scholars sought to make sense of what the ability to read and write means for us. While studies have included exploring the origins, use, and transmission of different writing systems, the central question remains: does giving a tangible form to the most fundamental aspect of humanity, namely our capacity for language, transform how we think about, perceive, and process the world around us? In essence, does literacy change who we are as humans? Understanding this has become all the more relevant as the rapid transition from analogue to digital technologies further complicates how people engage with the written word, and thus reshapes our sense of what it means to be literate (Jewitt 2006; Wolf 2017).

In this entry, we track the progression of literacy through different eras of anthropological theory. Early interpretations treated literacy as a lens for analyses at the societal level, a framework that saw writing systems as a means for differentiating between cultures and their imagined evolutionary, cognitive, and socioeconomic development, which thus helped to frame literacy as an autonomous technology independent of its social contexts (Morgan 1878: 3, 11). While this position has softened over the years, the crucial link between literacy and consciousness was maintained as scholars emphasised the intrinsic benefits that a literate mind offered individuals and the societies in which they lived (Goody & Watt 1963; Ong 2012).

Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to reflect on the sociocultural underpinnings of literacy practices, with the scale of analysis narrowing to focus on local specificity and variation (Scribner & Cole 1981). Strict definitions of ‘literacy’ and what it meant to be ‘literate’ were shown to be implicated in the hegemonic ideologies that structure our societies and determine our values, and have given way to more nuanced understandings (Bialostok & Whitman 2006; Street 1997; Blommaert 2008). This newer movement in literacy studies situated literacy’s power to marginalise and sought to re-evaluate the diversity of written language in ways that challenged normative assumptions prevalent in earlier models. Insights generated by a sociocultural approach to literacy have motivated anthropologists to work with educators to make pedagogical literacy practices more inclusive and empowering for students (Street 1997; Hornberger 2003). The increasing centrality of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life (Horst & Miller 2012) has led to a re-scoping of what it means to read and write, with traditional definitions of literacy becoming less relevant to understanding the emergent meaning-making processes of digital texts.

Literacy and pre-literature

In the discipline’s early years, anthropologists took so-called ‘primitive’ peoples as their subjects of inquiry to expand their understandings of humanity (Mandelbaum 1955: 213; Hsu 1964: 169). Broadly applied to peoples living beyond the cultural and political ‘West’, the term ‘primitive’ invoked a Hobbesian image of primordial humanity that contrasted with the presumed cultural, historical, and linguistic sophistication of the societies from which anthropologists hailed (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 169). While the term ‘primitive’ was used extensively by prominent anthropological theorists at the time, objections quickly arose due to its analytical ambiguity and racist implications of superiority and inferiority (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 173). In response, and on account of their apparent objectivity and perceived greater scientific precision, the terms ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ arose as alternatives to the ‘primitive’/ ‘civilised’ opposition.

Unlike primitivity, ‘literacy’ was considered to carry less awkward baggage, being an attainable state of socioeconomic and cognitive development rather than an essential and inherent condition. Those who had not yet learned to read could be identified as ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’, only because written literature had not been introduced or developed in their societies (Faris 1925: 711-2; Hsu 1964: 169). However, the use of ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ also assumed that literacy and orality were mutually exclusive (Dickinson 1994: 320) and presented literacy as the first step towards greater civilisation and sophistication (Faris 1925: 712). The essence of the connection between literacy and civilisation derived from a belief that written language had an inevitable impact on how people understood, interpreted, and made sense of the world around them.

As twentieth century scholars became increasingly interested in understanding how language might shape thought and culture (Whorf 1952; Lévi-Strauss 1966), the physical form of written language came to be seen as more than a simple representation of speech, and rather a unique form of language in its own right (Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 5, 8). While earlier assumptions ascribed a ‘prelogical’ cognitive state to ‘primitive’ peoples, a notion assuming that such communities were completely uninterested in abstract thinking and focused solely on ensuring their basic needs of survival (Lévy-Bruhl 2018; Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 10), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how both literate and oral peoples engage in the rational ordering of the world, albeit from quite different perspectives (1966: 269). Oral peoples were presented as reasoning with a ‘mythical thought’ pattern that was ‘entangled in imagery’, while literate peoples could reason at a ‘concrete’ level that was detached from perception and imagination (Lévi-Strauss 2001: 11-2; Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15, 20, 22).

Drawing from linguistic theory, Lévi-Strauss posited that the key difference between literate and oral thought processes was the capacity of the literate mind to distinguish between signs and the signified, thus being able to explore the relationship between images and the concepts they represent (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 18, 21). This perspective continues into the present with cognitive scientists like David Olson asserting that literacy leads to a meta-awareness of language that allows for an objectified and decontextualised understanding of concepts (2017: 239). Writing, having the capacity to lift words (signs and concepts) out of context, transforms them into objects that can be scrutinised and categorised on their own without attachment to a particular image or signification (Olson 2017: 241). In this way, the rationality of the literate mind has been compared to that of an engineer looking for ways to think beyond cultural and categorical constraints by critically focusing on its constituent elements, whereas the oral mind was theorised as only capable of rearranging, and never thinking beyond, the categories it was given (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19).

While ‘literature’ is generally used to refer only to cultural expressions with written form, there is no compelling reason to treat the verbal art of oral societies as fundamentally different to written traditions: oral literatures simply exist at one end of the spectrum of literary types (Finnegan 2012: 20, 27; Turin et al. 2013). A bias towards the written word combined with the tendency of anthropologists to record and transcode oral traditions into textual form (Turin 2014) has resulted in the misrepresentation of oral literatures as simply verbatim transmissions of narratives across generations, and further contributes to the belief that such traditions are cruder than written literature (Finnegan 2012: 15-6). In reality, the difference between written and oral literature is the mode of transmission: oral literatures are more dependent on live (and increasingly online) performances and are therefore characterised by greater variability as performers improvise and innovate, often in active dialogue with their audience (Finnegan 2012: 10-2). In contrast to the unchanging physical form of written texts which can be transmitted unaltered across time and space (albeit subject to much reinterpretation), the composition and dissemination of oral literature—much like music and dance—is dependent upon and inextricably linked to the performative context (Finnegan 2012: 4-5, 14). While this difference in tangibility has led to academic and popular assumptions regarding the supposed objectivity and verifiability of written historical narratives, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015) critiques such perspectives as holding a positivist bias that fails to account for how power enters into the process of constructing historical narratives. This results in conceptions of history that present a ‘fixed past’, whereas the ‘truth’ of history is actually intimately tied to the present even in the case of written records.

Working through the dichotomies: primitive/civilised and oral/literate

Early anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1878) suggested that writing gave a permanence to language that was fundamental for understanding a particular society’s thought processes and its capacity for development. For late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century anthropologists, literacy represented a necessary precondition for a culture to be considered a ‘Civilization’ within the monodirectional and evolutionary logic that served to organise all societies (Morgan 1878: 3, 11; Hsu 1964: 169; Akinnaso 1981: 180). While scholars would later criticise their predecessors for assuming radical cognitive differences between literate and oral peoples, many anthropologists nevertheless felt comfortable asserting that written language had a deterministic influence on an individual’s analytical processes and capacities (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Ong 2012: 8-9).

This position is known as the ‘universalist’ or ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. It understands writing to be a technology reliant on generalised skills and language practices that in turn impact an individual’s linguistic, cultural, and cognitive potential (Collins 1995: 75; Akinnaso 1981: 187; Ong 2012: 77-8, 81). Some observers, like Walter Ong, travelled far with this perspective, asserting that writing is an inevitable, even ‘absolutely necessary’, technology for the development of science, history, and philosophy; a precondition for nuanced understandings of art and language without which humans will not achieve their full cognitive potential (2012: 14-5).

According to this logic, and given their lack of written records, oral societies were presumed to be homeostatic, that is, internally and perpetually stable, operating with a model of cultural transmission incapable of distinguishing between history and myth, past and present. Literate societies, on the other hand, could draw on written records and were thus positioned to make objective distinctions between ‘what was and what is’ (Goody & Watt 1963: 308, 310-1; Ong 2012: 8; Faris 1925: 712). In this conceptualisation, literacy was a means for expanding a society’s capacity for rational and abstract thought (Langlois 2006: 18; Akinnaso 1981: 164; Ong 2012: 102) and if properly harnessed, could catalyse socioeconomic and cognitive development (Collin 2013: 29; Akinnaso 1981: 164, 169).

Research on oral literature has challenged the prevailing and myopic assumptions in the autonomous model of literacy. Comparative research shows that technologies like writing are better conceptualised as shaping, rather than determining, our collective and individual recollections (Martindale et al. 2018: 198; Scribner & Cole 1981). Archaeological evidence, for example, corroborates thousands of years of layered histories as recorded in the oral narratives of Tsimshian people in British Columbia, Canada, while members of the Thangmi community in Nepal disrupt the presumed path of orality to literacy by incorporating digital technologies as part of their techniques of recording oral history (Martindale et al. 2018: 199-200, 202). The centrality of oral performances to the recitation of origin myths by ritual practitioners is internalised by members of the Thangmi community who view orality as a source of strength and as essential to their ethnic identity (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 82-3). As a consequence, writing down the oral performances of Thangmi ritual practitioners can be seen as undermining the very feature that makes these narratives identifiably Thangmi (Shneiderman 2015: 83, 87). Alternative technologies, such as audio and video, present a more desirable means of documenting and transmitting oral narratives for practitioners who thereby retain control over the message, with multimedia helping to emphasise distinctiveness and variation, avoiding the pitfalls of standardisation through the mediation of the written word (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 87, 96).

Christine Helliwell’s work in a Borneo Dayak community further demonstrates the diverse understandings encoded in oral literature by contrasting two distinct narrative genres, the sensangan and the cerito Nosi (2012: 52). Both of these genres are considered high prestige art forms of storytelling and recount epic poems of great heroes, often taking many hours to complete. Despite this general similarity, they differ in a number of significant ways: the sensangan are a corpus of tales about the culture-hero and trickster Koling that are each narrated as a slow song with a drum accompaniment, whereas cerito Nosi are standalone stories chanted quickly without any accompanying instruments (Helliwell 2012: 54, 57). The different pacing and styles by which these two distinct genres are performed affect how the audience experiences and interprets their content. The slow pace of the sensangan allows for the content to be discussed by the audience as it is performed, while the rapid chanting of the cerito Nosi necessitates focussed attention. In contrast to theories that present oral societies as incapable of distinguishing between myth and history, the unique performative styles of these genres illustrate important differences in how their content is interpreted, impacting the level of truth attributed to the stories by the audiences (Helliwell 2012: 53, 60).

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) challenges the assumed necessity of written language for scientific knowledge with a description of the Onondaga Nation’s Thanksgiving Address. This ancient practice of expressing gratitude to the environment speaks to the relationship that the Onondaga Nation has to the natural world (Kimmerer 2013: 107-8, 111). As speakers name and thank each species in turn for their roles in sustaining the environment, the structure of the Thanksgiving Address serves as a scientific inventory of ecological information, ‘a lesson in Native science’ that unifies the speaker and audience in a collective reflection on the ethic of responsibility towards the land (Kimmerer 2013: 108, 110, 115). Crucially, much of the power of the Thanksgiving Address comes from its oral performance which, in contrast to a written document that may be skimmed, requires the audience to actively participate for the duration of its lengthy recitation and creates the space to contemplate one’s relationship to the environment (Kimmerer 2013: 110). Kimmerer asserts that Indigenous knowledge practices like the Thanksgiving Address can complement Western science’s focus on matter by interweaving Indigenous understandings of respect and gratitude, and by positioning ecological restoration as a return to reciprocal relations between humans and the environment (2013: 257, 263).

In short, while some communities may not have a long history of written texts, this does not imply that their histories and perspectives are solely confined to the present (Martindale et al. 2018: 205). Moreover, the assertion of the autonomous model that literacy results in improved rationality remains questionable when considering how real-time, in vivo oral performances allow for audience members to challenge and seek clarification from performers (Finnegan 2012: 14). This is no new realisation: Socrates himself identified that an inherent flaw of written language was its inflexibility. Seen in this light, the written word can hinder deeper understanding because a reader cannot challenge or seek clarification from a text. By definition, written words just keep repeating themselves (Wolf 2017: 76; Plato 2002).

Even though evolutionary theories of literacy fell out of fashion and remain unsupported by ethnographic evidence, literacy has continued to be used to distinguish between human cultures (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Akinnaso 1981: 164). In particular, the imagined capacity for social organisation, socioeconomic growth, and cognitive development that some acquaint with literacy continue to situate the terms ‘non-literate’, ‘pre-literate’, or ‘oral’ alongside a reduced level of technological development in ways that are unfortunate (Berndt 1960: 64; Akinnaso 1981: 164). While not connected to the earlier evolutionary theories, the technological determinism implicit in the autonomous model of literacy assumes negative consequences for both cognition and society in the absence of literacy. Furthermore, the standards by which certain language practices are recognised as constituting ‘literacy’ must be considered in light of the colonial histories that have informed those very standards.

As part of the colonial project, languages were historically equated with race, with non-European languages and their speakers categorised as inferior to Europeans and their language practices (Rosa & Flores 2017: 623-4). These racio-linguistic ideologies continue today in forms such as ‘standardised languages’ which can legitimate the language practices of White speakers by positioning their language practices as the ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’ to be used in written texts (Rosa 2016: 163, 165; Baker-Bell 2020), thus devaluing and discounting the diversity of reading and writing practices that exist outside of this narrow standard (Rosa 2019: 187-8). For this, the autonomous model of literacy has been critiqued as merely replacing one racist and evolutionary dichotomy (primitive/civilised) with another: preliterate/literate or oral/literate (Akinnaso 1981: 164; Langlois 2006: 16-7; Collin 2013: 29-30).

Literacy as a sociocultural practice

From the 1980s, anthropologists grew dissatisfied with the essentialising dichotomies that had characterised mid-twentieth century theories and that posited a ‘great divide’ between societies. Such simplistic binaries failed to explain the complexity and rationality present in oral societies (Collin 2013: 30; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382), not to mention the many varied ways in which oral and written language are used (Stephens 2000: 11; Dickinson 1994). In response, scholars shifted their inquiries from broad societal-level analyses to the local and granular, proposing a sociocultural model in which literacy was better understood as a collective activity with varied potentials dependent upon how a particular community incorporated writing into their processes (Collin 2013: 30; Street 2013: 54). Referred to as ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS), this movement made use of more ethnographic approaches and embraced a cultural understanding of literacy as a practice embedded within, and defined by, institutional settings and everyday life (Collins 1995: 80-1; Stephens 2000: 10).

In addition, NLS rejected the idea that writing was no more than a general skillset easily transposable onto different contexts. For example, the ubiquity of keyboard writing in certain societies has meant that ‘computer literacy’ has supplanted analogue forms of literacy practices to such an extent that being ‘computer illiterate’ is seen as equivalent to being illiterate (Blommaert 2008: 5). NLS proposes a relativistic, dynamic, and situated model that recognises diverse forms of ‘literacies’ embedded within particular cultural contexts, norms, and discourses. These vary across time and space and are tied to how individuals construct their identities (Collins 1995: 75-6; Street 1997: 48; Riemer 2008: 444).

NLS is therefore understood to advocate a culturally relativistic approach (Collin 2013: 32), with aligned research demonstrating how textual practices are influenced by cultural logics and beliefs (Riemer 2008), such as the use of magical writing in Ecuador as means of critiquing state power (Wogan 2004), or the strict norms regulating the creation and dissemination of textual documents to preserve community secrecy in a New Mexico Pueblo community (Debenport 2015). The NLS approach has encouraged anthropologists to reflect on how their own level of literacy in the ‘texts’ of the communities with whom they work may affect their interpretations. Researchers often ‘normatively reorganize’ texts, silencing the original author’s voice (Blommaert 2008: 10-1), while in other cases have little or no reading ability in the predominant written language of the communities with whom they work, calling into question the kinds of knowledge represented in anthropologist’s publications (Allen 1992; Ortner 1992).

A key element of NLS is the realisation that literacy functions as an ideology, and that the uses, meanings, definitions of, and efforts to control literacy policies are embedded within wider relations of power (Street 1997: 48; Wogan 2003: 66; Blommaert 2008: 6). Determinist assumptions inherent in the autonomous model of literacy cultivated a conviction within development organisations that literacy was a panacea for all social ills, leading to the entanglement of literacy programs with free-market neoliberal capitalism (Street 1997: 49; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 384). Targeting Indigenous peoples and other marginalised populations, development-minded literacy programs remain tethered to earlier missionary activities which sought to ‘civilise’ non-Western peoples through education and religious conversion (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Wogan 2004: 62-4; Besnier 1995).

Literacy interventions across the Global South during the mid-twentieth century, while distinct from the ethnocentric drive of missionary literacy programs, nevertheless upheld colonial ideologies through a ‘liberal paternalism’ that identified literacy as the path to progress and modernity (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 383). In such thinking, literacy was a mechanism for moral transformation, constituting new subjectivities in the context of modern capitalist states, with schools serving as key institutional sites for integrating individuals into the nation (Collins 1995: 82; Riemer 2008: 450). ‘Schooled literacy’, that is, standardised writing practices as transmitted in educational settings, replaced diverse literacies that were present in other social spheres (Collins 1995: 82). These diverse literacies might have included the reading of religious texts for ritual purposes, the use of books in children’s play (such as word games and puzzles), or reading stories aloud in the home (De la Piedra 2009: 116, 121; O’Neil 2007: 172). María Teresa De la Piedra’s research on the multiple forms of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ that coexist within the rural Urpipata community in Peru demonstrates that the replacement of alternative literacies with schooled literacy is not necessarily total; individuals continue to mix and appropriate Quechua and Spanish literacy for use in different contexts and to fulfil their own purposes (2009: 110, 112–3).

Jan Blommaert (2008) classifies alternative literacies under the umbrella term ‘grassroots literacy’, which he applies to a broad range of ‘non-elite’ literacy practices. These forms of writing deviate from standardised norms of spelling and speech and can usually only be interpreted within a local context (Blommaert 2008: 7, 193). Graffiti is an example of a grassroots literacy in which reading and decoding a script is only accessible to other graffiti writers (Blommaert 2008: 193). Some scholars consider schooled literacy to be part of an elite-led movement against grassroots literacies, seeking to establish a particular literacy standard as foundational for citizenship and the moral order, contributing to the problematic use of the term ‘officially literate’ as a necessary requirement to access social standing (Collins 1995: 82-3; Erickson 1984: 525; Rosa 2019; Baker-Bell 2020).

Laura Ahearn (2004) and Frances Riemer (2008) examine the effects of development-minded literacy programs in Nepal and Botswana. In Junigau, Nepal, Ahearn studied women’s newly acquired literacy skills in the 1990s in the context of the writing of love-letters and suggested that a growth in romantic elopements indicated that learning to write love-letters impacted how villagers conceptualised their agency (2004: 306). In Ahearn’s analysis, the dominant discourses of Nepali society encouraged a moral connection between the acquisition of literacy skills and increased development, capitalism, independence, and agency (2004: 309, 311). However, in connecting literacy to a belief that romantic love was integral to modern life (Ahearn 2004: 308, 312), development-minded literacy education in Junigau may have inadvertently resulted in women’s disempowerment, as those who chose to elope often lost the support of their natal families. Demonstrating how women who later faced difficulties in their marriage had few options, Ahearn challenges an instrumental view that positions literacy as a necessarily positive capacity that inevitably leads to greater empowerment (2004: 313).

Riemer’s research into the meanings ascribed to literacy in Botswana demonstrates that while adult learners may frame their path to literacy as coming to see ‘the light’, the greater sense of personal empowerment they experience as a result also leads to their increased participation in the modern global capitalist system (2008: 449-50, 458). Riemer describes a cultural model in which strong associations exist between literacy, education, and moral transformation, and the acquisition of literacy skills through schooling involves reconstructing one’s identity to be a full member of a modern community (2008: 451-2). Aside from the technical skills associated with literacy, the transformed sense of self produced through school-based literacy programs further situated these new readers in a nexus of discursive power relations constructed by ideologies of race, Christian morality, and political economy (Riemer 2008: 456-8). In this analysis, the desire for literacy—and the sense of personal empowerment that students feel—can be read as a ‘discipline’ in the Foucauldian sense in which literacy generates compliance and functions as a tool for assimilation (Riemer 2008: 458).

An anthropology of literacy education

The aversion to generalisation that informs NLS’s descriptivist approach to literacy limits its effectiveness as a scalable educational model, running the risk of generating little more than collected anecdotes about diverse forms of literacies (Besnier 1999: 141; Stephens 2000: 19). While acknowledging the importance of contextuality to literacy, Kate Stephens argues that some aspects of literacy skills development are not context-specific and can indeed be generalised, and that there is educational value in understanding how writing can be recontextualised and interpreted across time and space (2000: 12-3). Furthermore, while superior cognitive processing is not necessarily a consequence of being literate, there is increasing evidence indicating that literacy does support cognitive potentialities that cultivate skills like metalinguistic knowledge: that is, knowledge about language that may be impossible to harness without the linguistic objectification associated with literacy (Stephens 2000: 14, 16-7; Wolf 2017; Olson 1977; Olson 1994). A ‘literacy for education’ approach can balance the action-oriented concerns of educators with a greater anthropological recognition of context by offering language instruction for specific contexts and purposes (Stephens 2000: 20-1). So managed, the problem of shoehorning strict definitions of literacy into a narrow standard can be offset by expanding the range of practices that qualify as ‘literate’, thus diversifying the writing contexts for which students are prepared (Akinnaso 1981: 167; Street 2013: 60).

H. Samy Alim et al.’s (2011) examination of Hip Hop literacies offers an example of how the cultural relativism of NLS can mesh with the development of effective pedagogical models. While the Black English language used in Hip Hop has been criticised as ‘illiterate’, scholars point out that the grammatical prescriptivism of ‘standard English’ is itself artistically limiting and an example of linguistic racism that devalues the language and literacy practices of marginalised communities (Alim et al. 2011: 121; Baker-Bell 2020: 15-6). Recognising the normalising power of ‘schooled literacy’ in defining standards of educability (Collins 1995: 83; Erickson 1984: 531; Rosa & Flores 2017: 626-7), Alim et al. advocate for literacy education that locates its goals within the lived realities of its students by making it ‘ILL’, namely: Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory (2011: 134). Through Hip Hop, young people introduce their own cultural standards and prioritise ‘ill-legitimate’ artistic creativity, challenging dominant ideals of correctness by defining their textual practices as ill, or skilled (Alim et al. 2011: 122).

‘Ill-literacy studies’ helps to frame American educational institutions as illiterate on account of their inability to decode the culturally rich and linguistically complicated experiences of their students. This institutional illiteracy results in schools failing to take advantage of the range of opportunities for true learning (Alim et al. 2011: 122, 132). Drawing on NLS, which situates literacies within the politics of unequal power relations, identity formation, and state authority in modern capitalist nation-states (Alim et al. 2011: 133; Collins 1995: 81-2), ill-literacy studies redefines ‘being literate’ as a capacity to critique dominant ideologies and reclaim one’s own voice from the constraints of institutional structures and practices (Alim et al. 2011: 133).

Pedagogical strategies such as Alim et al.’s (2011) ill-literacy studies align with what April Baker-Bell calls ‘Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy’, which provide students with the opportunity to learn about and through Black English, thereby educating them into a ‘Black Linguistic Consciousness’ that can heal the traumas of ‘Anti-Black Linguistic Racism’ while simultaneously nurturing their language abilities (2020: 8, 34). Critical pedagogies of this type are crucial as they enable students and educators to see past the narrow-minded binary of the ‘street’ versus the ‘school’ that forces students’ identities, communicative repertoires, and literacy skills into contradictory categories that reproduce problematic hierarchies (Rosa 2019: 207-8). In this re-framing, students are not marginalised minorities but rather complicated individuals capable of giving voice to their lived realities through the use of ill-literate texts, without necessarily shunning the acquisition of traditional literacy skills (Alim et al. 2011: 134, 136, 140). So viewed, ill-literate pedagogies help to nurture metaliteracy and greater awareness in learners, uplifting their social consciousness beyond dominant ideologies of language and identity (Alim et al. 2011: 140).

Multilingualism and literacy education

As processes associated with globalisation bring ever-greater numbers of multilingual students into schools, literacy researchers face the difficult task of making sense of the specific challenges and opportunities that multilingualism introduces into the classroom environment (Hornberger 2003: 4). Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers identified a glaring gap between the extensive literature on multilingualism and writings on literacy. In response, a theoretical approach was developed for understanding how these two aligned phenomena interact with and shape one another (Hornberger 2003: 4). The concept of ‘biliteracy’ is the result of these inquiries and offers an analytical framework applicable to any occurrence of reading or writing in which more than one language features (Hornberger 2003: 5).

The biliteracy model does not characterise multilingualism and literacy through a binary perspective that (re)produces oppositions like first language (L1) vs. second language (L2), monolingual vs. bilingual, or literate vs. oral. Instead, it understands any single biliterate practice to be entangled within each of these states simultaneously. In this way, the biliteracy model conceptualises states of language as multiple, intersecting, and nested continua that together constitute a complex whole (Hornberger 2003: 4-5; Hornberger & Link 2012: 264). Briefly, these continua describe the media through which different languages are used; the contexts in which language and literacy practices are enacted and evaluated; and the content expressed by language and literacy practices; that is, their styles, genres, and the perspectives they communicate. In contrast to the compartmentalising and decontextualising perspectives that typically inform educational policies and practices, the biliteracy model enables researchers and educators to delve into multilingual settings and unpack how the development of biliterate skills occurs so that novel solutions in support of literacy education for multilingual learners may be imagined (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265; Hornberger 2003: 25).

Nancy Hornberger and Holly Link describe a scenario in which bilingual first grade students read an English language text while discussing it with one another in Spanish, and then respond to their teacher’s inquiries in English (2012: 269). The biliteracy model makes clear that, while the teacher’s acceptance of Spanish dialogue offsets obvious power dynamics and helps to validate students’ voices, the use of English as the sole language of instruction limits the possibilities for biliteracy development as Spanish is only permitted for oral communication (Hornberger & Link 2012: 270). Similarly, Melisa Cahnmann’s study of a grade nine Spanish-English classroom examines how correction and assessment strategies influence student resistance or acceptance of biliterate practices (2003: 191). During the research, Cahnmann learned that students would often draw upon their Spanish linguistic resources to aid them in the creation of English-language texts. For example, to assist herself in spelling the English word ‘people’, one student verbalised the Spanish phonemes of ‘PE-O-PE-LE’ [pronounced as ‘pay-oh-pay-lay’ in English] (Cahnmann 2003: 193). While some experts in second language acquisition believe that such inter-lingual transcoding should be discouraged, the biliteracy model considers any kind of transfer along the L1-L2 continuum to be an opportunity, because it reveals students’ strengths and identifies areas where teachers can focus their energy to support positive and impactful learning (Cahnmann 2003: 192-3).

The key insight of biliteracy is that interrelatedness between continua ensures that literacy and language skills can develop across and between different languages and literacies, with contextual factors determining and shaping specific manifestations (Hornberger 2003: 25). Stronger biliteracy skills will therefore emerge in environments that encourage students to draw on all points of the continua (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265). Crucially, this analytical framework is capable of recognising and incorporating students’ multilingual practices as part of a classroom’s learning resources, critiquing standard literacy norms while also producing alternative outcomes (Hornberger & Link 2012: 274; Cahnmann 2003: 189).

Re-imagining literacy in a digital world

The circulation of fast-changing information technologies and media in the twenty-first century introduces new aspects to established questions about what it means to be ‘literate’ in an overwhelmingly digital era (Wolf 2017: 219-20). Does the immediate access to vast amounts of information through Internet technologies change how people critically engage with texts (Wolf 2017: 222-3)? There is growing concern among researchers and educators that the shift from physical to digital texts may result in a reduction in the ability of young readers to analyse and think beyond the words they read, thus failing to perceive deeper meanings. In response, literacy research is moving towards understanding how students can become ‘multitextual’, that is, proficient in reading and analysing different kinds of texts in adaptable ways to harness the benefits of both print and digital media (Wolf 2017: 223, 226-7).

Multimodality is a theoretical approach to meaning-making that stems from social semiotics: the study of the social life of signs and symbols (Jewitt 2006: 3). In this framework, ‘signs’ refer to the association of meaning to a form; ‘modes’ describe the different forms in which signs are constructed (for example, an image versus a written word); and ‘media’ applies to the ways in which modes disseminate their signs (for example, ink on paper, computer screens, etc.) (Heydon 2007: 39). A social semiotic approach to the sociality of language recognises that linguistic meanings are constantly reproduced through people’s sociocultural work and are not simply a pre-existing code waiting to be activated (Jewitt 2006: 3). Multimodality extends this theory to suggest that the production of meaning is further influenced by any modes through which signs are communicated (Jewitt 2006: 3). In reconceptualising literacy as ‘multimodal design’, the analytical lens offered by multimodal literacy takes the focus away from the written word and broadens the frame to examine how people make meaning through the many modes and media to which they have access (Heydon 2007: 38; Jewitt 2006: 8).

Applying the multimodal literacy framework to new digital technologies can illustrate how digital media are reconfiguring our understanding of writing in generative ways (Jewitt 2006: 107). In particular, the dominance of writing is being decentred through digital technologies that harness images, speech, music, and moving elements to communicate (Jewitt 2006: 108; Heydon 2007: 39). In the classroom, there is increasing reliance on forms of ‘edutainment’; that is, games, computer applications, and videos used for educational purposes, in place of strictly textual resources (Jewitt 2006: 6-7, 108). The influence of the digital screen on the meaning of texts is so great that, even when it is used to render the written word, as in an e-book, it mediates how we encounter and interpret the text we read. For example, book layout is often restructured to fit a screen, altering how a textual narrative is represented on a page (Jewitt 2006: 108-9). Carey Jewitt asserts that new digital media are changing what literacy means so profoundly that it may soon no longer be possible to define reading solely as the act of interpreting the written word (2006: 123). Instead, readers will have to make sense of all the features that have been enabled by the capabilities of the digital screen as they navigate the meanings communicated by a screen’s multimodal design (Jewitt 2006: 123). Effectively ‘reading’ a digital text, then, also requires understanding how the design of images and writing contribute to the realisation of the text’s own meaning (Jewitt 2006: 136).

Conclusion

This entry offers a review of how literacy has been theorised in anthropology since the first days of the discipline. While perspectives have changed over the years, with definitions of literacy fluctuating between opposing frameworks of technological determinism and cultural relativism, the underlying theme remains unaltered: the development of literacy represents one of the most significant innovations of human history.

Despite more than a century’s worth of research on literacy, questions about how humans shape literacy and how literacy shapes humans continue to be actively discussed. The rapid development of new information and media technologies has only accentuated the conversation. As new media invite novel possibilities for encoding and decoding meaning, which in turn result in changes in language practices, communication, and society, literacy will continue to be a prominent subject of anthropological research. If the history of anthropological theory is any indication of its future, the role of literacy in shaping the human condition will be ardently debated as its function is productively reinterpreted.

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Note on contributors

Mark Turin is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, cross-appointed between the departments of Anthropology and the Institute of Critical Indigenous Studies. His research is situated in the fields of language documentation, reclamation, and revitalisation with regional focuses on the Himalaya and the Pacific Northwest of Canada. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2262-0986

Prof. Mark Turin, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. mark.turin@ubc.ca

Robert Hanks is a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines language and literacy education in multilingual contexts and the decolonisation of pedagogy. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3788-321X

Robert Hanks, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. rhanks@alumni.ubc.ca

Metrics

Felix Stein — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:44:52 +0000

Marlee Tichenor

University of Edinburgh

Initially published 14 Oct 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20metrics

Abstract:

Numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life seem to govern our existence more and more. Particularly since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of quantification for governance has grown, and anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to the ramifications of metrics, or numeric representation that translates assumed realities into numbers (Rottenburg & Merry 2015: 2). They study whether and how the production, synthesis, analysis, and use of metrics is tied to the rise and decentralization of audit and accountability in contemporary capitalism. This entry will first provide a theoretical framework for the anthropology of metrics, drawing on science and technology studies and the history of science. Then, it will discuss how anthropologists have analysed the social impact of enumerative practices. Looking at the practices and infrastructures that produce metrics and that metrics in turn produce, this entry will highlight the importance of colonial legacies for shaping what is ‘knowable’ in the realms of global governance, economics, and health. Finally, the entry will point to tensions at the heart of contemporary critiques of metrics: in our ‘post-truth’ world, these critiques cannot reject the usefulness of truthfully describing and estimating human phenomena. However, these critiques foreground the idea that metrics are always just one form of evidence among many.

Introduction

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of quantification for governance has gained momentum, and anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to the ramifications of numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life. As historians and philosophers of science and technology have made clear, statistics, and the rendering of the world into numbers, have long played a fundamental role in the rise of the modern nation-state (Foucault 1973; Porter 1990; Hacking 1990; Desrosières 1998; Scott 1998). For example, quantification practices co-created the notion that ‘populations’ existed and could be governed from above (Foucault 1973; Scott 1998). Thus, numbers have long contributed to giving meaning to various aspects of modern and contemporary life. What is new in recent decades, however, is that the increased use of metrics has led to ‘new forms of global governmentality’ (Shore & Wright 2015: 22). This means that our lives are increasingly governed by numbers and numerical surveillance – not only those used by nation-states, which have long used numbers as a means of governing from above, but also by non-state forces. In this way, these metrics increasingly define what it means, for example, for educational or health institutions to be effective or for individuals to be healthy and happy.

Metrics, or the standard means of measuring or evaluating processes and phenomena for the purpose of governance, are the ‘translation of (assumed) realities into numbers’ (Rottenburg & Merry 2015: 2). Their production, synthesis, analysis, and use are tightly tied to the rise of audit and accountability in contemporary capitalism, where governing practices such as assessing corporate sales performance or student achievements become more decentralised (Power 1999; Strathern 2000). These numerical representations are often presented as objective truth, yet they are produced through technical and social practices that are always at least partially specific. Most statisticians and data scientists producing quantified data and syntheses of, say, ‘gross national products’ or ‘burdens of disease’ know that there are many reasons for why these simplified metrics are not perfectly objective. This can be due to a human element of designing and implementing surveys, unclear or distorted categories in which data are placed, missing data, changing statistical equations, and statistical uncertainty. However, because these subjective components can be neatly packed away when metrics travel, the power they have in determining national budgets, international funding flows, social justice claims, and so on, is considerable.

The metrics discussed here are not merely numbers, which have multiple points of historical and geographical origin. Instead, they are the indices, indicators, statistics, and biometric standards used on the part of governments, international and non-governmental organizations, private companies, and governance scholars. They are meant to be replicable and universal, creating comparability between different countries, economies, corporate entities, or populations. According to Vincanne Adams (2016), these metrics were born out of a desire in the West to aspire to the universal, as well as out of the rise of statistics that occurred simultaneously with the ascent of the modern nation-state, serving ‘as the invented conceptual counterpart to the hubris of the age of imperialism’ (Adams 2016: 20). The anthropology of metrics investigates the politics of evidence, analysing why certain numerical forms, whether crime rates or funding flows, are taken as legitimate over other (less numerical) forms. It also pays close attention to the ways that counting practices and their associated categories can produce the very phenomena that they are supposed to measure. This can occur when sorting and separating phenomena into categories that come with built-in theories about the world – like degrees of ‘development’ or economic prosperity. Here, specific notions of what makes a good life are suggested and perpetuated by acts of measurement. The proliferation of indicators and rankings is thereby ‘creating new forms of power and governance, and new kinds of subjectivity^[1] (Shore & Wright 2015: 22), as institutions and individuals are assumed to be appropriate entities for external audit and governance through numbers. This includes how universities in the United Kingdom, for example, are now ranked specifically by the quantified impact of research by the Research Excellence Framework, which has material effects on their funding and the focus of their activities (Stein 2018).

Some authors have included the ways that numbers and counting practices have wide and varied symbolic and practical meanings in different cultures within an ‘anthropology of numbers’ (Crump 1990). Most of the anthropology of metrics, however, focuses specifically on the use of numbers, statistics, and counting technologies in the practice of governing, at different scales of human experience. This entry will first provide a theoretical framework for the anthropology of metrics, which stands in conversation with science and technology studies (STS). Anthropologists of metrics both contribute to the larger interdisciplinary STS conversation and speak beyond it by using their discipline’s particular methodologies, including ethnography and participant-observation. They investigate infrastructures and practices of measurement and they pay close attention to how these impact the lived experiences of both practitioners and targets of technologies of measurement. For example, numerical surveillance on the cellular level – like counting the quantity of virus in a given amount of bodily fluid – has become a language that some living with HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida use to describe their ‘suffering, personal triumph, and achievement’ and to define their personal experience of risk (Sangaramoorthy 2012: 293). Next, the entry discusses engagements with metrics within the field itself, tracing histories of the impact of numbers and outlining key contributions such as anthropologists’ analysis of how metrics in the realms of global governance, economics, and health shape our lived experience and institutions.

Finally, the entry will point to anthropologists’ ambivalence toward metrics. Although the focus of this entry is on the anthropology of metrics, that is, with metrics and their efects as central objects of study, anthropology is also done with metrics. Applied anthropology in business and development, for example, makes use of both quantitative and qualitative methods. A further ambivalence arises with the conflict between qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding the world around us. It is reflected in critiques of metrics that argue for the importance of stories over numbers (Moats 2016) or for situated knowledges^[2] over a singular, objective truth (Haraway 1988). Yet, we exist in a world where scientific expertise in general and statistics in particular are being cast by some world leaders as suspect, and where ‘alternative facts’ – an ingenious rebranding of ‘lies and falsehoods’ – become more widely disseminated as official accounts of the effects of climate change, of the origins of gun violence in the US context, or of reasonable public health approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this ‘post-truth’ world, an anthropology of metrics calls for nuance. It does not make the case to end all metrics, but wants to understand them better so that they may actually enrich our lives.

Social sciences of metrology

The anthropology of metrics is situated within a larger social scientific critique of quantification and enumeration. The history and philosophy of science has long attended to the ways that the sciences have aspired to and produce objective representations of world phenomena, situating the development of these practices in particular historical moments and as resulting from a specific trajectory of theoretical thinking. Metrics are part of the effort to create ‘objective’ representations of the world. Lorraine Daston and others categorise three types of objectivity: mechanical, where objectivity suppresses the ‘human propensity to judge and aestheticize’; aperspectival, where objectivity eliminates idiosyncrasies; and ontological, where objectivity brings about a ‘fit between theory and the world’ (1992: 597). Quantification aspires to all three forms of objectivity, producing a rule-bound, un-self-interested, true representation of the world.

Quantification is an exemplary practice of the production of objectivity, as it replaces arbitrariness, idiosyncracy, and judgment by explicit rules (Porter 1992: 633). Quantification is thus in part a ‘technology of distance’, meant to remove all forms of subjectivity. It creates international communities with a common language, and can be used by politicians and institutions to garner the trust of the populations they serve (Porter 1995: ix). The rise of the power of statistics was therefore tied to the rise of the modern nation-state, and by the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, statistics came to be perceived as the premier means of producing general knowledge for the populace and as a fundamental tool for addressing corruption within the democratic political system (Porter 1995; Merry 2011).

In the rise of the nation-state, statistics were particularly important for producing the concept of population upon which new forms of power could be exerted, as can be seen in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. This new form of power was based on new forms of thinking about life and disease in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Foucault argues that, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the power of a sovereign ruler shifted from the simple power to kill someone (the power over death), to aiming at making populations grow (i.e. exerting power over life). Biopower was born, as a form of power that regulates the individual body and populations at large. According to Foucault, it became the main mode of sovereign power: controlling sexuality, economic life, and personal health, for example, often through the use of statistics. As a result, people’s subjectivities, or the way that they understand themselves in the world and live their lives, began to change. They started to conceive of their bodies as if they were machines, and began adhering to better eating and exercise habits, for example. New intellectual disciplines, like sociology and epidemiology, contributed to these emerging forms of controlling the body. Better knowledge of life and health were also indispensable for the development of capitalism, as the institutions of power that control health are also those that condition bodies to function in the machinery of production (1978: 141). For example, the ‘ideal worker’ became a self-disciplined and regulated self, produced and maintained by social scientific and medical texts about the moral value of productivity and the responsibility of the individual to stay healthy.

Within the context of the medical sciences, the growing influence of physicians was key for developing statistical thinking and ideas of what counts as ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’. Opening up corpses, for example, was pivotal for the production of biopower, as it allowed for a direct comparison between bodies, which in turn facilitated the development of statistical averages against which individuals could be compared (Lock & Nguyen 2010). This comparability and the practice of making things commensurate are central to the work that numbers and metrics do, by putting diverse phenomena into the same category in order to start counting. Importantly, that which may seem quite simple, ‘like how to name things and how to store data’, actually ‘constitute much of human interaction and much of what we come to know as natural’ (Bowker & Starr 2000: 326). Quantification may be a seemingly natural technology of classification, yet as Foucault (2001) has shown, the ranking and separating of countries, institutions, and projects through evaluative indicators and data production have specific histories and always reflect more than mere ‘common sense’.

In the twentieth century, the power of the nation-state became less centralised and all-encompassing than in Foucault’s analysis. Local and international governing agencies increasingly determined people’s everyday lives. This changed the role that quantification took in governance. According to Michael Powers, this decentralisation led to an ‘audit explosion’ (1994) which has been central to contemporary forms of governance since the 1990s. Quantification practices have often themselves become the link between populations and the local, national, or international entities that govern their economic, social, and physical wellbeing. These forms of wellbeing, as well as the accountability of governing organizations to secure them, have become objects to monitor. Practices of accountability – of counting and holding to account – have, for example, become a main mode of instilling trust in institutions which are now are measured against pre-defined quantitative indicators determining their success. This ‘governance by numbers’ has reached new levels with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), introduced in 2015, whereby all UN member states are obligated to produce data and monitor their progress across 17 goals and 231 individual indicators (Fukada-Parr & McNeill 2019). Sakiko Fukada-Parr and Desmond McNeill are among the scholars who argue that these indicators ‘have distinctive effects on knowledge (how things are conceptualized) and on governance (behaviour of actors, policy choices)’ (2019: 6). In this way, the means by which the SDG global development agenda is implemented – through the measurement of 231 individual indicators on such wide policy issues as health, education, poverty, and environment – is at the mercy of group consensus on statistical methodologies for how we measure poverty or ill-health, as well as what kinds of quantified data are actually available. What is measurable becomes what is implementable in our global development agenda and in global public policy.

Contemporary metrics-based modes of defining and determining good governance tend to have their origins in New Public Management (NPM), a school of thought that aims to render administrative structures and processes more business-like (Strathern 2000; Hulme 2007). Under the guise of ‘good governance’, they are often aimed at increasing economic efficiency. Thereby, they frequently join together ‘the financial and the moral’ (Strathern 2000: 1), presenting what is financially sound as being morally valuable. Accountability in this way holds its older meanings of responsibility to one’s fellow citizens or those under one’s care, while also gaining new meanings about promoting efficiency and balancing one’s cheque-book. One way of making sense of these developments is to consider them as part of the on-going rise of neoliberalism. In the context of a continued retreat of the state in the neoliberal present, business and finance-based auditing and accountability practices have expanded outward, becoming the means of defining success for medical, educational, and other social services institutions. University rankings incite students to apply to one university rather than another, while key performance indicators increasingly determine public sector budget allocations. Metrics also drive private investment by ranking corruption levels and the quality of life of entire countries. They even evaluate our day-to-day activities, such as our eating habits and exercising routines (Merry 2011: S84; Rottenburg & Merry 2015), designating each of us as a ‘quantified self’ accountable to ourselves and our fellow citizens for our individual and group well-being (Moore 2017). In this way, the governing power of the metric – in the context of global shifts of decentralization and the continued retreat of the state’s responsibility for our wellbeing – has gained the ability to assert new relationships of responsibility, alongside its ability to measure economic efficiency. Thus, much of our social lives is now assessed by managerial techniques of accountancy and performance management that do not just describe what we do but also assert our activities’ moral worth, often with an economistic bent (Shore & Wright 2015).

An anthropology of metrics

Drawing these debates into anthropology, scholars have asked whether the increased use of evaluative metrics has impacted both our societal structures and how we see ourselves. After all, the quality of our sleep or ability to be mindful, and even our societies’ levels of happiness, are closely linked to who we are. Since rankings enable comparability and competition between countries, institutions, and individuals, they have come to be a foundational component of how we situate ourselves and others in the world. It may define our individual sense of success where our university sits on ranking systems, or whether our country is ‘lower-middle income’ or ‘upper-middle income’. Further, indicators and evaluative metrics are a language through which we communicate urgency, morality, and our responsibility to one another, invoking or requiring redress or action. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation uses its estimations on global health burden to justify its own – non-transparent – investment in global health (Tichenor & Sridhar 2020). On the other hand, the Programme for Action for Cancer Therapy uses the evocative statement that ‘One woman dies every 50 seconds’ from breast cancer to both advocate for more funding for research and development for treating breast cancer, while also invoking women into action to attend to their own health through screening or genetic testing. In this way, metrics are tools of both the powerful and the resistance, and the viability of metrics is determined by the power structures within which they are produced and amplified.

Anthropologists have tended to study metrics through ethnography. Merry defines this methodology as

examining the history of the creation of an indicator and its underlying theory, observing expert group meetings and international discussions where the terms of the indicator are debated and defined, interviewing expert statisticians and other experts about the meaning and the process of producing indicators, observing data-collection processes, and examining the ways indicators affect decision making and public perceptions (2011: S85).

There has been a rise in the number of ethnographic analyses of monitoring and evaluation practices in the domains of justice, economy, and health.

A. Metrics in global governance

Take the example of global governance, which is a governing system headed by the United Nations and the member-states, agencies like the World Health Organization, and other international organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Within the system of global governance, countries are evaluated based on their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or their Human Development Index (HDI), or the World Bank’s newly introduced Human Capital Index (HCI). These evaluations have concrete impacts on what kinds of funding countries can receive from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, including the quality of their credit. In global health, countries are ranked based on the quality of their health systems and are provided with funding to fight certain diseases based on their perceived need through a metric known as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). Yet, the nature of these indicators and the means of their production ‘involves a range of discretionary and sometimes arbitrary decisions’, despite their assumed objectivity and ability to represent reality (Jerven 2013: 4). There are missing data and questionable assumptions, and the debates about what can be counted and what cannot will remain hidden under the final indicator produced.

Morten Jerven (2013) has shown this by spending extensive time in statistics offices in different countries across Anglophone Africa, interrogating how the assumption that most of the ‘least developed countries’ are in Africa is based on partial and often inadequate information. Working with very limited resources and limited data, these statistics offices must regularly produce statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI). In order to be ‘legible’ or acceptable, they must reinforce existing assumptions about income levels in-country, assumptions which then help both the international community and government agencies choose where to invest funds in the country.

It is not a trivial matter that GDP is, in this way, created based on existing assumptions that international agencies have about the level of ‘development’ of a country. As Lorenzo Fioramonti (2014: 15) shows, GDP is founded on the idea that ‘that which is not priced, what does not involve formal financial transaction based on money does not count’ toward one’s country’s social or economic wellbeing. GDP has thus given more power to the economy over politics and society. Further, these practices of enumeration and the defining of countries’ levels of ‘development’ or economic prosperity based on metrics have their origins in colonial projects. In the context of the British colonial power in India, ‘exoticization and enumeration were complicated strands of a single colonial project’ (Appadurai 1993: 315). Here, censes, maps, agrarian surveys, racial studies, and other projects of quantification were a crucial component of the categorization and essentialization of the ‘other’ under colonial rule. Metrics contributed to creating Orientalism (Said 1978), which was the process by which Western artists, scholars, and government officials exoticised populations in ‘the Orient’ – or the Arab world and Asia – through cultural and governmental representations of these populations, and which was a necessary and destructive foundation for colonial rule. Defining a country’s ‘development’ or ‘underdevelopment’ based on what is quantifiable and carries a price, and using statistical estimates based on pre-existing assumptions about ‘development’ levels, risks perpetuating the exoticising practices of colonialism. These measurement practices are all the more important as our current geopolitical system is based upon them.

The fact that evaluative metrics often carry with them ideas of financial value that enable the economic valuation of diverse human experiences becomes particularly obvious in development contexts. Gerhard Anders (2008: 187), who has studied the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s work in Malawi, calls this normative infusion of monitoring and evaluation the ‘normativity of numbers’. He shows how loans from both organizations came with conditionalities – that is, particular policy requirements attached to them. Conditional loans were meant to reconcile the organizations’ twin goals of respecting country ownership and tackling corruption. They required careful monitoring of particular ‘good governance’ indicators, such as GDP, inflation rate, and average life expectancy.

B. Metrics in justice and education

Within the domain of justice, it has become obvious that indicators exercise power in a variety of ways. They have, for example, been used to bring claims to individual human rights into closer relation with population-based discourses and management of international development, as economic indicators have increasingly been used for measuring and ranking human rights compliance (Merry 2011: 2016). Thus, economists at the World Bank, who have been pivotal for collecting and collating socioeconomic data throughout the world, have promoted the concept of ‘economic rights’, such as the right to an adequate standard of living or to social security, as central to the human rights agenda. Their success illustrates the power of certain indicators over others, based on the resources that they open up or close down. With the considerable economic and governing power behind it, the World Bank can prioritise which kinds of indicators it uses to direct its funding, or how much funding individual countries or organizations receive. It has the power to refine human rights indicators to prioritise the economic opportunities of individuals over other aspects of human life. These decisions affect not just what kind of funding countries may receive, but also how they measure human rights issues within their own borders.

Metrics often shape what is prioritised in our justice and education systems, but anthropologists have also shown that they must be understood in the context of other forms of evidence. Thus, qualitative narratives or other forms of evidence are part and parcel of numeric indicators themselves. Take the example of popular media rankings of quality for law schools. They impact the day-to-day occurrences within those schools by producing narratives that are just as important as the numbers themselves (Espeland 2015). When rankings are reorganised and some law schools are suddenly put ‘below’ others that law students and faculty had previously believed themselves to be superior to, they may provide narratives that try to temper and explain away the new hierarchy. For example, a law school dean may provide a narrative to his students about the ways that the rankings themselves were produced and the fact that they could be impacted, and changed quickly, by limiting class sizes the next year. In this way, rankings create narratives that ‘speak back’ to the numbers. Other examples also show that indicators are not simple and straightforward facts, but that they require qualitative interpretation, a perspective that some South African prosecutors studied by Muegler (2015) have taken. Thus ‘performance measurement systems’ measuring the ‘accountability’ of the justice system to the country’s population in South Africa must be analysed through how indicators and measurement are used in legal cases. The prosecutors’ ‘stat talk’ was always situated in larger understandings of practices of accountability, showing how indicators always must be understood in their larger context.

C. Metrics in health

The anthropology of metrics has traditionally had a strong focus on health. This is linked to the history of colonialism, where measurements of the body, of health, and of illness have been particularly pernicious in producing and maintaining oppressive theories of othering and racism (Arnold 1993; Anderson 2005). This history highlights how important it is that anthropologists continue to analyse the assumptions at the heart of health metrics. Further, techniques of measuring the body or sub-elements of the body have come to stand in for determining health in general, in ways that shape the lived experience of individuals as well as the institutions with which they interact.

In The mismeasure of man, evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould (1996) explains how complex human intelligence was systematically reduced to what could be measured with crude tools, such as IQ tests and skull size gauges, and how such unsuitable proxies were used to justify existing social hierarchies. The use of metrics of bodily weight and size to measure individuals’ health echoes this history (Yates-Doerr 2013). For example, obesity has come to be measured through various techniques including waist circumference, body mass index, and bioimpedance analysis. As part of this trend, ‘the public health community has become swept up with the idea that measurements can reveal the interior health of the body’ (Yates-Doerr 2013: 50). A major goal in public health is to find the best tool to provide a quantified value for body fat. In the process of finding more and more ‘accurate’ tools to do so, public health officials and clinicians easily forget the ‘representational quality of numbers’ and allow them to stand in for the concept of health itself. This standardised and metrics-based understanding of health stands in contrast to alternate ways of conceiving of fatness. In Guatemala, for example, where one individual’s corporeality is not necessarily commensurate with another’s, fatness and illness are not considered to be intrinsically linked as they so often are in the public health literature. Here, experiences and attitudes about fatness connote abundance and joy rather than illness or poor health. While numerical representations are not inherently bad, the power of numbers means that ‘other knowledges about bodies become harder to see, and though they certainly do not disappear, they become more difficult for scientists and public health worker to value’ (Yates-Doerr 2013: 64).

Metrics tend to impact those who use them, down to the level of their innermost subjectivity. Enumerative practices around the surveillance and prevention of HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida, for example, have helped shape the identities – or ‘numerical subjectivities’ – of those living with the disease (Sangaramoorthy 2012: 292). Here, HIV/AIDS patients come to define themselves and how they understand wellness through their viral loads, or the number of viruses within a given amount of bodily fluid. They also define themselves through their CD4 counts, or the number of CD4+ T cells in a given amount of fluid, measuring individuals’ immunity levels. They tie changes in such numbers explicitly to external phenomena, arguing they might change for the better if a favourable health policy was passed. At the same time, statistics co-create how people see the world around them. Thus, the Center for Disease Control uses gathered surveillance data on Haitians living in Miami, classifying them as a ‘high risk’ population that requires extra HIV/AIDS surveillance. This is a legacy of the incorrect assumption that the presence of the disease in the US originated from Haiti (Farmer 1992), and Thurka Sangaramoorthy shows how Haitian-Miamians’ contemporary risk level is based on national statistical estimates on the disease. Previously-held assumptions about these populations being ‘high-risk heterosexual’ populations have made them particularly targeted for surveillance, and as a result of these categorizations, Haitians living with HIV/AIDS in Miami have internalised this externally imposed risk. In opposition to non-Haitians understanding their HIV/AIDS experience through ‘numerical subjectivity’, Haitians living with HIV/AIDS in Miami have been placed in a category of ‘high risk’ by outside forces – a category maintained through statistical surveillance – that has led them to reject these same practices of self-enumeration because of these legacies of discrimination. In this way, categorizations maintained by metrics are imposed externally, but there is always space for rejecting or manipulating them on the level of the individual.

Since global health metrics are powerful tools, they are always a tangle of contentions over epistemological definitions of disease, competition over limited funding from international organizations, and techniques of calculating and modelling proxies for disease. This has been shown in the example of maternal health in Malawi (Wendland 2016). Here, the officially-stated national progress on maternal health, based on a maternal mortality ratio (MMR), stood in painful disconnect to the experiences of physicians at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. The MMR had been estimated in 2010 by the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which projected success in the country’s goals for maternal mortality. Yet local physicians observed the same frequency of funeral processions in the maternity wing of the hospital. An analysis of the way that IHME and the World Health Organization produce MMR estimates shows that the metric, in places where maternal mortality data collection is sparse, like Malawi, is, in fact, an estimation of estimations, which in this instance failed to capture reality and risked losing funding for maternal health programmes. At the same time, epidemiologists, statisticians, and demographers have been developing and advocating for better metrics to measure progress in maternal health, asserting that their current forms do not appropriately represent reality (Storeng & Béhague 2017). However, it may be that at the heart of this effort is not so much a desire to represent the world, but one to ‘sell’ maternal health as a priority over other health issues to global health donors. It may well be that health metrics are themselves marketing techniques in a world governed by indicators.

In a world where metrics proliferate but health inequalities persist, one may go so far as to ask whether metrics create value only for a select few (Erikson 2016: 148). Not only are numbers required to give value to past action, but they are also asked to produce ‘future actuarial worth’. Promoters of health interventions among the global health community in Seattle, or Washington D.C, for example, often package their work for investors by providing productions of ‘expected growth’ due to their interventions, providing them a return on their investment (Erikson 2016: 153). Metrics have evolved from being strictly an accountability tool to one to be used to attract and incentivise investment, which we can see in the example of the shift in how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has approached the use of metrics. ‘“Tools of business’ will be the solution to bringing health and welfare to the world’, Bill Gates stated in his 2013 Annual Letter, showing how BMGF has fully embraced the use of metrics to govern global health like a business. These ‘incentivizing financial tools’ have been proliferating at a clip, using modelled and forecasted metrics as a means to show investors which medical commodities are the important ones to support.

One particularly elaborate incentivising financial tool of this sort is the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which promised large interest rates to investors in the absence of a major pandemic within a three-year window (Erikson 2015; Stein & Sridhar 2017). Using medical expertise as well as that of multinational insurance companies, the PEF’s dispersal of funds for the support of lower- and middle-income country governments and global health agencies is determined by a series of metrics that some have argued are ill-fitting for many potential pandemics (Jonas 2019). This raises the question of whether metrics can be used to incentivise inaction, rather than action in global health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the PEF was only triggered in late April 2020, when other non-metrics-based funding mechanisms had already been allocated. In addition to fostering inertia, and slowing down the disbursement of aid, metrics like those required by the PEF turn health itself into an object of investment for which actors obtain a financial return (Erikson 2016). This shifts the fundamental measure of success for health interventions from addressing health problems to whether an investor makes a profit, further deteriorating the concept of health as a public good.

Conclusions

This entry has focused on the anthropology of metrics, which analyses the effects of the increasing quantification of our institutions, communities, and selves. However, anthropology’s engagement with metrics as an object of study exists alongside the use of indices, indicators, and statistics for research. Anthropologists make use of or even help produce population-based statistics to provide context for ethnographic studies. At the same time, the UK’s Research Excellence Framework requires that anthropology departments produce performance indicators of the impact of their research, turning its members into both producers and researchers of metrics. Anthropologists sometimes assert that their research output is ‘a form of counterevidence to metrics’, which produces a tension between ‘stories and numbers’ (Moats 2016: 596). They will need to bridge the chasm between qualitative and quantitative ways of representing the world, which exist alongside and in tension with each other (Benton 2012). Rather than arguing against metrics, which is a dangerous thing to do in our ‘post-truth’ world, anthropologists may want to argue for better metrics and the simultaneous use of multiple modes of evidence. Analysing the practices that create metrics, and interrogating their effects, does not stand in for an argument against their use. Instead, it indicates the importance of couching metrics and quantified data within other forms of evidence, in a way that ensures that the assumptions, data sources, and estimations that were used to create them remain clear.

We may today be reaching a point at which the production and consumption of evaluative metrics has reached its peak (Kelly & McGoey 2018). At the same time, our trust in the systems that produce and consume them is at a historic low. In a time where nuance seems to be mostly absent from political debate, debating the validity of metrics feels like a dangerous game. And yet, those who design and implement metrics, and those whose lives are impacted by them, must understand how the dominant categories and measurements affect social life. Based on this understanding, they may be able to decide where measurement is needed and where unmeasured life should continue.

Acknowledgements

This entry is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant agreement No 715125 METRO (ERC-2016-StG) (“International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field”, 2017–2022, PI: Sotiria Grek). It was also supported by Wellcome Trust [106635/Z/14/Z].

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Note on contributor

Marlee Tichenor is a research fellow in the Social Policy Department at the University of Edinburgh and received her PhD from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. She is a medical anthropologist interested in the politics of evidence and data in global health policy and intervention.

Marlee Tichenor, Social Policy Department, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15A George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD. marlee.tichenor@ed.ac.uk

[1] In anthropology, ‘subjectivity’ is used to mean many things, including personhood, the ‘emotional life of a political subject’ (Luhrmann 2006: 345), and the processes by which a ‘modern subject’ is made (Biehl, Good & Kleinman 2007: 1). The concept is used to interrogate the ways by which individuals understand themselves and how this is influenced by social processes and conditions around them.

[2] Along with other feminist anthropologists of science, Donna Haraway has argued that the objectivity touted by natural scientists over the centuries is not a ‘view from nowhere’. She holds that evidence, research designs, and theories have historically been produced from a Western, masculine perspective, and that all production of knowledge must be thus understood to be ‘situated’ (Haraway 1988: 575). Social anthropologists, particularly since the field’s representational turn in the 1980s, have tended to assert the importance of acknowledging the positionality of the ethnographer in the knowledge they produce about different communities.

Childhood

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 09:17:23 +0000

Catherine Allerton

London School of Economics and Political Science

Initially published 4 Jun 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20child

Abstract:

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’ research that takes children’s perspectives on their role and position seriously. Anthropological research casts a critical light on institutional attempts to formulate universal understandings of childhood, whether these are found in developmental psychology, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the spread of formal schooling as an essential aspect of modern childhoods. Children, through their participation and observation in social worlds, are always understanding more than they are told by adults, often applying cultural concepts or different languages in innovative ways. This frequently leads children to destabilise or reject wider representations of childhood that reflect adult prejudices, or wider fears about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood or a loss of ‘innocence’. Paradoxically, adult attempts to protect children, whether from work or from societal harms, often say more about the politics of representations of childhood, than they do about children’s actual experiences.

Introduction: children and ‘childhood’

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time, and descriptions of children’s activities, talk, games, and work appear in many different anthropological texts.^[1] But human societies differ widely in their answers to the questions: ‘who counts as a child?’, ‘what kinds of care and instruction do children need?’ and ‘what knowledge do children have of their worlds?’ The study of these and other questions is part of the cross-cultural comparison of ‘childhood’ as a socio-historical construction that varies widely both across and within different societies.

Anthropological research has demonstrated that there is no single, universal understanding of childhood as a stage of the human life cycle (Montgomery 2009; Lancy 2015). As a result, anthropologists have often cast a critical light on scientific and institutional attempts to make universal pronouncements about children, or to prioritise particular understandings of a ‘normal’ childhood. This includes adopting a critical perspective on developmental psychology as ‘the’ science of childhood.^[2] Most psychological experiments have been conducted with children in what David Lancy (2018) calls ‘WEIRD’ (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) societies. And yet, from the perspective of non-WEIRD societies, such understandings of ‘normal’ childhood are distinctly anomalous. For example, the American psychologist and educator, Stanley G. Hall (1904) defined adolescence as a turbulent and transitional period of ‘storm and stress’, arguing that the physical changes experienced at puberty had a tumultuous impact on young people’s emotional life. By contrast, in Coming of age in Samoa, Margaret Mead disputed this universal picture of adolescent disturbance, asking whether such difficulties were ‘due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?’ (1928: 5). Mead’s book painted a picture of Samoan adolescent girls whose lives were full of leisure, and who did not experience conflicts around their sexuality. Her conclusion was that the ‘storm and stress’ of American adolescence had cultural rather than biological causes, telling us more about the anxieties of American society than about children’s universal experiences. Indeed, later anthropologists have argued that the study of children is crucial to understanding key cultural values and conflicts (Hardman 2001 [1973]; Gilliam & Gulløv 2019).

A key, early influence on anthropological approaches to childhood was Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of childhood (1962), in which he argued that European children in the Middle Ages were seen and treated as little adults, lacking separate clothing, games, or spaces. Ariès thought that the very notion of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life did not exist for most of European history. Although Aries’s arguments, in particular his analysis of representations of children in pictorial art, have been criticised,^[3] his central contention – that concepts of ‘childhood’ varied and that European children’s worlds had not always been so separate from those of adults – had a huge influence on the development of ‘childhood studies’. This is a multi-disciplinary field, in which anthropologists have engaged with sociologists, geographers, historians, and others arguing for a new paradigm for the study of childhood as a social construction.^[4]

Not only do constructions of childhood vary across space and time, but childhood also intersects with other variables, such as social class, gender, and ethnicity. It has been argued that economic and social realities influence ways of treating children, leading, for example, in urban Brazil to ‘two distinct forms of childhood’ (Goldstein 1998: 395). Rich children are pampered and spoiled by their parents and by the domestic workers employed to care for them. By contrast, the very children of those workers are hastened into adulthood, working inside the home from the age of 5 or 6, and sent out to do waged work by the age of 9 or 10.^[5] Childhood – in the sense of a carefree time of freedom and lack of economic responsibility – is a ‘privilege of the rich’ in this context (1998: 393). In America, too, social class shapes attitudes towards childrearing and understandings of children’s natures. The lives of preschool children in New York City have been shown to be marked by a ‘hard individualism’ of working-class communities and a ‘soft individualism’ of the upper-middle-class (Kusserow 2004). Whilst ‘hard’ individualism directs children towards tough resilience, self-sufficiency and independence, ‘soft’ individualism emphasises the importance of protecting and nurturing the child as a unique little person. Here, the conception of childhood held by upper-middle-class parents leads them to dismiss the relevance of social class, since they are led to emphasise the uniqueness and naturalness of their young children’s selves.

Socialization: becoming a cultural person

The ‘Culture and Personality’ school of American cultural anthropology, with which Mead is associated, was interested in how culturally-specific child-rearing practices shaped the emotions and personality of children as a cultural beings. Indeed, Mead herself saw the different peoples of the world as a kind of laboratory of child development, in which each culture presented a different set of experimental conditions for the treatment of children. In a short film, Bathing babies in three cultures (1951), made with Gregory Bateson, Mead showed how something as apparently straightforward as bathing a baby could be approached very differently, the method corresponding not only to the environment but also to a culturally-specific training of the young child’s emotions. Cora Du Bois, another member of this school, conducted fieldwork in the late 1930s on the Indonesian island of Alor, describing the impact of caregiving and disciplinary techniques. Relatively unusually for her time, she also analysed children’s drawings, and conducted Rorschach psychological tests. Du Bois argued that childhood experiences were central to the development of the ‘modal personality’, or common personality type, of a particular culture. However, she also acknowledged the significance of innate, individual differences in shaping adult character (1944: 3-4).

The Culture and Personality school’s interest in child development evolved into a number of cross-cultural studies of child-rearing, most notably the ‘Six cultures’ study. This ambitious project utilised a common methodology to compare ‘different patterns of child rearing and subsequent differences in personality’ (Whiting 1963: 1) in six field sites in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, India, and the US. Its ethnographic results were rich, with systematic attention to children’s treatment and routines, but with little attempt to make a general argument, given the significant differences between the cultures under study. Robert LeVine, an original member of the Six cultures team, continued its tradition of in-depth, observational research, examining childcare among the Gusii of Kenya from the 1950s to the 1970s. He argued that Gusii practices which diverged from those considered optimal in the US – such as not asking questions of young children, or not allowing them to initiate conversation with their elders – made sense within a local model of childhood and care (LeVine et al. 1994).

Early British anthropology was less concerned than American anthropology with psychological development, and more interested in socialization as the broad process through which immature beings became mature, competent members of a society. A generation of anthropologists trained by Bronislaw Malinowski included descriptions of children’s lives as a standard element of their ethnographic monographs. In We, the Tikopia, Raymond Firth discusses children’s care by and relationships with family members, the ‘independent little bands’ of children that work and play together, and children’s role in helping households run smoothly’, given their obedience to adult instruction (1936: 145-150). In Chisungu, Audrey Richards (1956) analysed a series of ritual acts and physical challenges for Bemba girls, one of a number of studies of initiation rituals and their role in the socialization of children. This work showed how the ‘end’ of childhood, and the attainment of adulthood, was not necessarily a natural event, but had to be achieved through ritual means. Studies of children’s position and role within the family also drew attention to the impacts of birth order (Firth 1956, Fortes 1974) and fostering arrangements (Goody & Goody 1967) on children’s treatment.

In linguistic anthropology, a number of anthropologists have focused on ‘language socialization’, the ways in which children are socialised to use language in different societies, and the ways that this shapes children’s development. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin (1984) outline and compare three different ‘developmental stories’ with respect to infants’ language socialization. The first of these, the ‘Anglo-American white middle-class developmental story’ (the ‘story’ taken as standard in much psychological literature), involves an approach to infants as fully communicative partners. This cultural context encourages face-to-face interactions and mutual gazing between infants and caregivers, simplification of speech by adults (‘baby talk’), and the rich interpretation of infant vocalizations. By contrast, the second such ‘story’, found amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, emphasises the ‘softness’ and lack of understanding of infants. Here, infant utterances are not interpreted, and babies are not spoken to in ‘baby talk’.^[6]Instead, Kaluli caregivers turn their babies outward towards the social group, and speak ‘for’ their infant, often in a high-pitched, nasalized voice. Finally, according to the ‘Samoan developmental story’, young infants are also not conversational partners; neither babbling nor baby-talk are encouraged, and children must instead be socialised to show ‘respect’ by always considering the perspective of higher-ranking persons. Based on these stories (and their attendant constructions of early childhood), Schieffelin and Ochs argue that societies can be divided into two main types: those (such as white Anglo-American society) that adapt situations to the child, and societies (such as Kaluli and Samoa) that try to adapt the child to situations.

Amongst the Beng of rural Côte D’Ivoire, infants are thought to be reincarnated ancestors emerging from an ‘afterlife’ called wrugbe (Gottlieb 2004). This spiritual journey is a long and difficult one, and therefore infants and young children are thought to have a fragile hold on life. Gottlieb considers Beng infants’ social lives to be strikingly active when compared with babies in her native US. Though her research moves beyond earlier concerns with culturally-specific personality development, Gottlieb nevertheless sees the Beng emphasis on infant sociability as shaping children’s emotional responses in distinctive ways. In particular, and as a result of extensive alloparenting (care by those other than parents), Beng babies do not have exclusive or intensive attachments to their mother, something that might be seen as part of ‘healthy’ development in Western settings. Similarly, in Inuit morality play (1998), an ethnography of a three-year-old girl, Jean Briggs approaches young children’s actions and experiences as part of a complex social world shared with various adults. Briggs argues that Inuit adults encourage children to think deeply about moral issues by presenting them with emotionally powerful problems in an exaggerated and personally relevant style. This takes several forms, most notably the asking (by neighbours and kin) of dangerous questions – ‘Will you come and live with me?’ ‘Shall I be your new mother?’ ‘Shall I kill your father?’ – often in a sustained ‘interrogation’. Through these complex, playful dramas, Inuit adults test children, experiment with their developing emotions, and help them learn to control their behaviour in specific ways.

Knowledge and learning

Anthropological research with children has always been interested in ‘education’ in its broadest sense. Childhood, from this perspective, is interesting because it is the crucial period during which cultural knowledge is re-constituted, and possibly negotiated, by children. Although adults sometimes explicitly instruct children in particular ideas or practices, much of this learning takes place in an unconscious, embodied way. Raymond Firth saw ‘education’ in Tikopia as practical and non-disciplinary, ‘hinging upon the participation of the child in all ordinary activities from early years’ (1936: 147). Similarly, in Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland (1938), Meyer Fortes emphasised how Tallensi children, unlike many British children of his time, did not exist in a differentiated ‘children’s sphere’. Rather, they shared the same activities and knowledge as adults, allowing them full participation in economic, ritual, and religious life. Fortes’s text gives a rich account of children’s everyday education as they take part in agricultural tasks, look after livestock, join ceremonies and dances, and joke with grandparents. He argued that children in this rural society rarely asked ‘why’ questions, since so much of their learning took place in real situations where they directly observed and practised skills.

Earlier work within the socialization frame tended to focus on childrearing by adults as a way in which (relatively passive) children were moulded. By contrast, more explicitly ‘child-focused’ ethnographies approach children not simply as adults-in-the-making but as social agents in the present. Such work gives more space to what children say and know, and the ways in which this might be different to what they are told by adults. In The private worlds of dying children (1978), Myra Bluebond-Langner describes how, as their illness progresses, leukemic children come to learn about the world of the hospital in which they are treated, about their parents’ desires, and about their own grim prognoses. Bluebond-Langner argues that American childhood is commonly understood as ‘a period of formation, of becoming’ in which children are ‘molded for their futures’ (1978: 210). This concept explains the reluctance of both medical personnel and children’s parents to talk explicitly to the children about their condition and treatment. Although these children still manage, through close observation, to gather accurate information about disease and death, they must practise what Bluebond-Langner calls ‘the rules of mutual pretense’ in order not to disrupt the ‘illusion of their normalcy’ (1978: 213). In pretending not to know that they are dying, the children demonstrate their social competence, upholding the future-oriented concept of childhood, and protecting both their parents and their doctors.

Other studies have also explored this disjunction between (limited) adult instruction and (extensive) child knowledge. Peggy Froerer (2011) argues that, in a tribal village in rural Chhattisgarh, central India, children are never systematically taught moral lessons in right and wrong. Nevertheless, as peripheral participants at adult-centred rituals, children pick up moral understandings, which they then utilise in response to illness. In the village, illnesses may be considered ‘simple’ and morally neutral, or may be considered to be ‘supernatural’ punishments for moral infractions. Adults state very explicitly that they do not consider children capable of causing “supernatural” illness, whether in themselves or others, since prior to marriage they are not thought to have acquired full knowledge (Froerer 2011: 376). However, children have a different understanding of their knowledge and capabilities and consider themselves to be responsible for illnesses caused by ritual or other misdeeds. This example shows how children do not simply reproduce or replicate the ideas of adult social actors (who are often dismissive of children’s explanations), but have their own perspective on moral responsibility, actively applying adult understandings to their own behaviours. More broadly, some anthropologists argue that it is only by studying how children come to make sense of particular concepts, such as hierarchy or ethnicity, that adult knowledge can be properly understood (Toren 1993, Astuti 2001).

Children’s abilities to only partially accept the messages of adults regarding child competencies are also demonstrated in work on language use. On the Caribbean island of Dominica, a complex, multilingual situation exists, where English (the official language of government and school) appears to be squeezing out the local Afro-French creole, Patwa (Paugh 2012). Adults, who want their children to master English, forbid them to speak Patwa, even as adults use Patwa in their own interactions, or even sometimes to instruct children. Nevertheless, ethnographic attention to micro-level, playful interactions between siblings and peers in ‘child-controlled settings’, shows how Patwa remains an important language for children. Whilst it may be forbidden to them, the fact that children hear Patwa used by adults in ‘affect-laden socializing activities’ means that children use the language in specific ways amongst themselves, most notably to ‘intensify their speech and control others’ (Paugh 2012: 19). This work is informed by the tradition of language socialization described above, but shows the significance of children’s talk within a multi-lingual context where language use carries complex socio-political messages.

Formal schooling and new models of childhood

The spread of formal schooling around the world has brought with it new models of the place and work of childhood. Significantly, one consequence of the spread of formal schooling noted in much anthropological work is a disconnect between the knowledge and skills valued in school, and locally-valued, culturally-specific skills and knowledge. For example, the introduction of formal schooling amongst the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon has led to a striking contrast between the spaces of schooling and the social environments in which children are raised (Rival 1996). Attending school gives these children few transferable skills, whilst spending time away from the forest and longhouse deskills them in the knowledge essential to Huaorani cultural and economic life. This gap, or disconnect, between school and children’s home environments was central to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s (1977) study of French schooling and inequality. They see the French educational system as reproducing wider social hierarchies by valuing the cultural capital (forms of speech, manners, and ways of behaving learnt unconsciously in a home environment) of children from upper-middle-class backgrounds and devaluing the cultural capital of lower-class children. Schools, they argue, make middle-class children’s cultural capital (a product of their class upbringing) appear ‘natural’, thus legitimising the reproduction of class privilege. This imposes a kind of symbolic violence (non-physical repression) on non-elite children, who develop a sense of their ‘social limits’ and begin to self-censor in the company of the elite. In ethnographies of schooling, such unofficial values and judgements are often referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’.

Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of the connections between schooling and social inequality has come to be known as ‘reproduction theory’, since they focus on the role of formal schooling in reproducing wider structures of inequality. However, this work often fails to consider the perspectives of the very children being marginalised in school. By contrast, Paul Willis (1977) gives more space to the ways in which working-class youth creatively struggle against the inequities of the schooling system. Learning to labour is an ethnographic study of a school in an industrial, urban setting in the English Midlands. The primary focus is ‘the lads’, a group of twelve boys who Willis describes as members of an ‘oppositional culture’ in the school. In contrast to Passeron and Bourdieu, Willis shows how the lads were not simply socialised by the institution to self-censor or to accept their subordinate position. Instead, he describes how they constantly disrupted school routines, fidgeting and tutting in class, following a ‘foot-dragging walk’ down corridors, and frequently erupting into ‘derisive or insane laughter’ at the expense of the school’s conformist pupils (1977: 13). These boys talk back to the middle-class ideologies of school, and celebrate their own working-class masculinity. Ironically, though, in choosing ‘having a laff’ (1997: 29) over conformity to the educational process, ‘the lads’ ultimately seal their own fate, leaving school without qualifications and reproducing their class position.

If this, and later, research (see especially Evans 2006) emphasises the role of class structures in shaping children’s experiences of formal schooling, other works have analysed the significance of racial and gendered aspects of identity to exclusion (see Canessa 2004). They explore, for example, how the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a Californian elementary school marginalises and isolates African-American boys, denigrating their style and body language, judging their familial forms of English as inferior, and ultimately constructing them as ‘bad boys’ (Ferguson 2000). Another ethnography of a Californian school analyses the construction and policing of high school masculinity through the ‘fag discourse’ used to attack students who (either temporarily or permanently) appear to be homosexual (Pascoe 2007). Significantly, upholding (heterosexual) masculinity is important not only to teenage students but also to the school itself, as an institution invested in rituals (school rallies, prom, yearbook photos, popularity contests) that affirm heteronormative gender roles.

In addition to highlighting the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the implicit or unintended lessons, values, and perspectives transmitted in schools, critical anthropological work on formal schooling has also explored its other impacts. One key issue is the extent to which school systems have ‘stolen’ childhood from children, turning their lives into a stressful, endless ordeal. Thus South Korean children have been described as facing an ‘examination war’, with nearly every minute of their lives organised around school or the extra classes (up to five hours a day) deemed necessary to ensure their ‘success’ (Cho 1995). Students are ‘trapped in a system that calls for intense inhuman competition and rote learning’ (1995: 154), with resultant impacts on mental and physical health. Similarly, Norma Field (1995) paints a portrait of Japanese education as ‘endless labor’, with the ordinary school day followed by ‘cram school’ in the evening. Whereas Ariès drew attention to the lack of a set-apart concept of childhood in early European history, Field highlights the ‘disappearance of childhood’ taking place in ‘an orderly, prosperous society’ (1995: 60). A further, somewhat different, critique is that formal schooling has created aspirations and expectations that, for many children, in developing contexts, are impossible to fulfil. In response, some governments have tried to create more practical school curricula for children. For example, in the late 1990s, the Ugandan government introduced a more ‘rural’ or ‘vocational’ curriculum that promoted local farming and aimed to equip children with the relevant skills for agricultural livelihoods (Meinert 1995). However, this was not well received by rural children themselves, who had hoped that going to school would enable them to pursue an urban social status. In the words of one sixteen-year-old, ‘Life in town is sweeter…. If you get stranded here in the village, you will work very hard, but life is just bitter’ (Meinert 1995: 183).

Anthropology, then, has often taken a critical perspective on formal schooling, questioning its separation from local knowledge, showing how it reproduces existing social hierarchies, and drawing attention to its frequently negative impacts on childhood experience. However, the picture drawn is not entirely negative. In rural Taiwan, and despite the disconnections between school and everyday family life, the importance of schooling is emphasised in part because schoolteachers are held up by parents as models for children to emulate (Stafford 1995). Similarly, Ethiopian schoolchildren see their teachers as inspiring figures and are strongly motivated to please them (Marshall 2016). This example is interesting for showing how the promise of better jobs and higher status in the future are not the only reasons why children might wish to attend school. In this Ethiopian case, children are motivated by the desire to be loved, valued for their hard work, and ‘respected’.

Problematising child rights

Today, the work of many international development agencies and child-focused NGOs is informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The CRC puts forward a particular model of childhood as a time deserving of ‘special care and assistance’. Much contemporary, critical anthropological work on childhood has been concerned with exploring the implications of this universal construction of children’s individual rights, particularly in developing contexts.

Two key principles of the CRC are that, firstly, the ‘best interests’ of children should be the primary consideration in all actions concerning them (Article 3) and, secondly, a child’s views should be sought in matters affecting the child (Article 12). However, these principles are not straightforward. For example, in NGO programmes for orphans in Uganda, it is usually adults who make decisions about children’s ‘best interests’; child orphans themselves are rarely meaningfully consulted (Cheney 2017: 52-3). In Thailand, child prostitutes have become figures of concern to the international community and yet, as Heather Montgomery explores (2001a), children’s own voices and perspectives on this difficult issue are rarely heard. Montgomery conducted fieldwork in a squatter community where child prostitution had become central to maintaining precarious household incomes. Contrary to the stereotypes of activists, children in this community do not necessarily see themselves as passive victims, but emphasise that they are working to uphold a moral obligation to their parents. For Montgomery, the problem with the CRC is that it does not give clear guidance on how to prioritise or balance achieving different child rights. In order to uphold children’s ‘best interests’, she asks, whose voices should be prioritised? And how can we balance children’s right to be free of sexual exploitation with their right to family life, or to have their voices listened to? (2001b: 95)

The contradictions of child-rights-framed aid programmes have also been investigated in Vietnam (Burr 2006). One NGO-supported project in Hanoi aimed to remove children from the streets and help them return to countryside homes. However, although the program was apparently informed by the CRC, it put adult wishes before those of children, and was entirely ineffective. No provision was made to help rural families cope with the extra costs of supporting a dependent person, and so a significant percentage of the relocated children soon returned to their life in the city. The study outlines a clash between children’s own desires to work and the beliefs of (privileged) NGO workers that they should not. As many ethnographers have shown (Aptekar 1991, Glauser 1997, Hecht 1998), adult perceptions of such children as ‘out of place’ on the street are often behind misguided attempts to ‘help’ them.

Debates around ‘child labour’ (work that exploits or harms children) are also highlighted by Melanie Jacquemin (2006), who describes a child-rights-framed NGO project supporting ‘Young Female Domestics’ in the city of Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire. This project concerned paid domestic work carried out by girls under the age of fifteen. However, by focusing only on a minority of girls known as ‘little waged maids’, the project neglected a larger category of child workers known locally as ‘little nieces’. These girls are considered foster children and often work long hours in the homes of extended family members for no pay. Indeed, Jacquemin argues that the distinction between being a family member and an employee is kept ‘purposefully blurred’ in these situations in order to ‘obscure but maximize exploitation’ (2004: 485). By focusing only on ‘child labour’ as a problem for paid workers, the project in Abidjan inadvertently contributed to local understandings (shared by the girls themselves) that what ‘little nieces’ do is not work.

Not only does Jacquemin’s research demonstrate the potentially negative impacts of heavy-handed rights-based attempts to ‘abolish’ child labour, it also chimes with other research on the gendered complexities of children’s work. In Children’s lifeworlds (1994), Olga Nieuwenhuys makes a case for taking children’s perspectives on their work seriously. Although adults in a Keralan village did not see girls’ domestic tasks as ‘work’, Nieuwenhuys discovers that the girls themselves did. She argues that discourses on child labour make light of the huge differences between the work of male and female children, where the work of the latter is productively essential but ideologically undervalued. More widely, Nieuwenhuys has problematised what she describes as the ‘dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work’ (1996: 237), arguing that rights-based attempts to ban ‘child labour’ have the paradoxical impact of reinforcing children’s vulnerability to exploitation.

Despite attempts to globalise ‘child rights’, cultural context is key to understanding children’s particular vulnerability or resilience. Susan Shepler (2014) focuses on the demobilization (releasing from various armed forces) of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, following the 2002 end of the country’s decade-long civil war. Shepler argues that Sierra Leoneans have their own ‘culturally specific reactions to child soldiering’ that are not reflected in global child rights discourse (2014: 16). What is most disturbing to them is not the so-called ‘lost innocence’ of child soldiers, but the disruption of village-based intergenerational relations. Shepler pays detailed attention to youth who bypassed the rights-based programmes designed to help them, and instead ‘spontaneously’ reintegrated. Ironically, although such youth do not have access to the benefits that NGOs provide, they are better able to blend back into their communities than children who are ‘formally’ reintegrated, whose ‘child soldier’ identity is often unintentionally hardened.^[7]

The politics of childhood

Debates around children’s rights and the imposition of particular expectations of children’s needs make clear that childhood is often a politically contested concept. Liisa Malkki analyses the profoundly depoliticised ways in which children’s images are utilised in ‘transnational representational spheres’ (2010: 58). For example, the figure of the child often serves to represent a ‘basic human goodness and innocence’ (2010: 60; see also Fassin 2013). However, the problem with this representation, and others, is that when children do not fit into these images, they are viewed as a ‘category mistake’. That is, they are not seen as ‘real’ children. This aspect of Malkki’s analysis helps explain a number of examples where young people’s status as children is not recognised. For example, in Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Haiti, street children have been criminalised and dehumanised as dangerous ‘others’, leaving them vulnerable to round-ups, and violent attacks, by the police (Bourdillon 1994, Scheper-Hughes & Hoffman 1998, Kovats-Bernat 2006). In the UK, immigration officials may disqualify those seeking political asylum from the category of ‘children’ because ‘real’ children are assumed to be apolitical (Crawley 2009: 99). In Sabah, East Malaysia, the Malaysian-born children of migrant workers are seen by the wider society as ‘impossible children’ since they have been born to people who are meant to be temporary, and whose families are meant to reside elsewhere (Allerton 2018).

Since the publication of Mead’s Coming of age in Samoa, several anthropologists have utilised the ‘coming of age’ genre to explore how children negotiate new expectations and experiences in rapidly changing social conditions (Markowitz 2000, Fong 2004). This work demonstrates the micro-political and emotional impact on children of inter-generational change. For example, in traditional Canadian Inuit society, ‘adolescence’, as it is commonly understood, did not exist. Instead, through constant intergenerational contact, children reached social and economic maturity at a relatively young age (Condon 1990). As the previously nomadic Inuit have become concentrated in settlements, and with the introduction of formal schooling and television, adolescence has gradually emerged as a new category of childhood experience. In the settlement, older children are less reliant on their families, and able to spend more time with groups of peers. However, the pressures of new social and economic expectations, combined with the loss of cultural and linguistic traditions, have led to an increase in drinking, violence, and youth suicide (Condon 1990: 276; see also Stevenson 2009).

Ethnographies of transnational migration and kinship have also described the impact on children’s lives of social and economic change. In Children of global migration (2005), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the lives of children ‘left behind’ in the Philippines by migrant parents. Amongst children of migrant mothers, a discourse of ‘abandonment’ was particularly prominent, and children expressed emotions of longing, grief, and anger about their situation. Parreñas argues that the ‘gender paradox of globalization’, in which women are pushed to work outside the home even whilst they are still held to the ideal standard of a nurturing and physically intimate mother, has mostly negative psychological consequences for children. By contrast, in her study of Ghanaian transnational families, Cati Coe (2014) describes how the West African region has a long history of ‘fostering’ in which children ‘circulate’ between different households. Here, migration is an ever-present possibility in children’s lives. Nevertheless, even in this context, there is still a marked contrast between the views of adults and children. Whilst parents tend to be relatively upbeat in their representations of migration, children’s emotional responses to their living arrangements in Ghana reveal feelings of a lack of control over their situation.

However, despite the often-negative impacts on children of social change, and of new expectations of childhood, care, and kinship, children often respond positively to social transformations. In a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, children are compelled to engage with different projects of (Palestinian and Jordanian) nationalism, as well as the transnational Islamist movement (Hart 2002). However, they do so creatively, reshaping and resisting different influences and sentiments where possible. For example, one 12-year-old girl, Muna, identifies strongly as ‘Palestinian’, and is concerned about religion, but also supports a Jordanian football club and enjoys aspects of Western TV and pop music. Muna’s response to multiple cultural and religious influences is illustrative of children’s ability to imagine themselves as belonging to more than one community, and to respond in dynamic ways to political discourses.

Conclusion

Anthropological research has shown how childhood varies across space and time, how it involves different expectations of young people of different ages, how it intersects with other variables such as social class, and how it shapes children’s everyday experiences. Although many earlier anthropological studies were interested in childhood for what it revealed about the cultural formation of personality, or the socialization of young people into social roles, later work has moved away from a narrow focus on children as simply adults-in-the-making. Ethnographies that take children’s own knowledge seriously have explored children’s own cultural perspectives, and their ability to creatively respond to linguistic, social, and economic change. Even as arguments are made about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood in contexts of contemporary formal schooling, economic exploitation, or armed conflict, children often demonstrate considerable resilience.

One powerful finding of child-focused ethnography, as seen in Bluebond-Langner’s research with terminally ill children, is that children are often very aware of the realities from which adults may try to shield them. This is why understanding concepts of childhood is a central task in appreciating the realities of children’s lives. As Donna Lanclos notes in her study of play in Belfast, children ‘do not passively accept the definitions of “child” that are imposed from without’ (2003: 48). In their language use, their jokes, or their interpretation of illness, they may subtly resist adult perspectives on childhood. This resistance is nicely illustrated by Danish toddlers who are bussed out of the city to attend ‘nature kindergartens’ (Gulløv 2003). Whilst their parents see these natural spaces as the proper place of childhood, some of the children complain about the cold and lack of toys. Anthropological research shows how, even when we think we are acting in children’s best interests, we may be imposing our own understandings of childhood on them.

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––––––– & D. Hoffman 1998. Brazilian apartheid: street kids and the struggle for urban space. In Small wars: the cultural politics of childhood (eds) N. Scheper-Hughes & C.F. Sargent, 352-88. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Note on contributor

Catherine Allerton teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is a specialist in island Southeast Asia, with research interests in children and childhoods, migration, kinship, place, and landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in rural Flores, Eastern Indonesia, and in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia.

Dr Catherine Allerton, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk

[1] This article draws in part on material published in ‘Guide to further reading’ (2016) in Children: ethnographic encounters (ed.) C. Allerton, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

[2] For a critical feminist approach to mainstream theories of child development that draws particular attention to their impact on everyday family lives, see Burman (1994).

[3] For example, Nicholas Orme, in Medieval children (2001), refutes the idea of the nonexistence of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life in the Middle Ages, drawing on evidence of parents who grieved intensely for sick or dead children.

[4] The central text in outlining this paradigm is Constructing and reconstructing childhood (1990) by Allison James and Alan Prout, which emphasises the importance of studying children’s social relationships and knowledge in and of themselves.

[5] Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1993) has also shown the impact of state neglect and poverty on the ability of Brazilian mothers to care for their infants.

[6] This strongly contradicts the arguments of those, such as Colwyn Trevarthen (1988), who argue that the use of simplified ‘baby talk’ is a universal, innate response to infants.

[7] Research with ‘child soldiers’ has also questioned the application of the (adult) psychiatric condition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a way to understand their responses and wellbeing (Boyden & de Berry 2004: xiii).

Bureaucracy

Felix Stein — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 15:59:23 +0000

Nayanika Mathur

University of Oxford

Initially published 9 Nov 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17bureaucracy

Abstract:

Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office (‘bureau’). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an expanding corpus of work that concentrates its attention on explaining how different bureaucracies – from different arms of the state to NGOs to supranational organizations – actually function; what their ‘inner worlds’ are like; and why and how they produce the results they do. The second approach can be described as one that looks at how bureaucracies monitor or audit themselves as well as how they are pushing for self-reform. From a time when bureaucracies were almost entirely neglected by anthropologists due to a (mis)perception of them as disenchanted Weberian iron cages of modernity, there is now a far keener awareness of the operations of bureaucratic structures and demands. Nowhere is this more evident than in the critical awareness of bureaucratic demands and constrictions within Euro-American Universities.

Introduction

The English word bureaucracy is borrowed from the French bureaucratie, which itself was formed by combining bureau (‘desk’) and -cratie (a suffix denoting a kind of government). Literally, it translates into a form of government that is predicated upon a desk – more precisely, an office. It is believed to be coined by the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759) and moved into the English as ‘bureaucracy’ in the early 19^th century (Harper 2017). As the entry on bureaucracy in the Merriam-Webster dictionary notes, the word has, right from its very start in the early nineteenth century, carried with it pejorative connotations. An 1815 London Times article, for example, declares: ‘. . . it is in this bureaucracy, Gentlemen, that you will find the invisible and mischievous power which thwarts the most noble views, and prevents or weakens the effect of all the salutary reforms which France is incessantly calling for.’ The capacity of bureaucracy to thwart noble or creative views is only further solidified by the utilization of its verb form – bureaucratization – in pathological terms.

Popular readings of Max Weber (1922) are partly to blame for this powerful imaginary of bureaucracy as something that quells creativity, reform, vitality and is only about dull things such as files and rules. In Economy and society, he outlines the main characteristics of bureaucracy, a form of officialdom that reaches its purest form only with modernity: it is ordered by a stable set of rules; operates through a form of graded authority or hierarchy; and the management of the modern office requires expertise, official competence, rule-boundedness, and is based upon files. Bureaucracy features centrally in his ‘rationalisation thesis’, described as ‘a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times’ (Kim 2012). In one reading of Weber, the world was increasingly disenchanted due to the rationalization of all spheres of life – partly due to increasing bureaucratization – and the world was being propelled towards a rigid ‘iron-cage’ of modernity (1930). While closer readings of Weber throw up a more complex dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment, his discussion of modern bureaucratic petrification lingers on.

Governance

A primary contribution that the anthropological study of bureaucracy has made is to illuminate how varied institutions of governance actually work; how and why they produce the sorts of results they do; and what their cultures of work are. The state and its several wings – ranging from courts of law to village councils – have received particular attention in this regard. There has also been a focus on non-state organizations of welfare and humanitarianism, from small NGOs to large supranantional organizations like the United Nations.

Most commonly bureaucracy has been studied through a focus on:

1. The everyday and/or extraordinary events

2. Materiality and affect

These approaches to the study of bureaucracy are neither exhaustive nor are they mutually exclusive. Rather, they are a tool to aid us in thinking through how a notoriously difficult-to-anthropologise subject such as bureaucracy has been tackled.

Arguably the anthropology of the state has produced the largest corpus of writing on bureaucracies. Historical work on colonial state formations had already discussed the significance of rules, documents, surveys, and other knowledge-making practices that allowed imperial state formations to know and, thus, govern their colonies (e.g. Cohn 1996). Work on Empire had pointed out the significance of the work of bureaucracy in making and maintaining states, for instance, with Ann Stoler describing the colonial archives and the documents housed within them to be ‘technologies that reproduce’ states (2009: 28). Weber (1922), probably before anyone else, had identified the locus of power in the modern state to reside within the bureau, which in turn was dependent upon files and the management of documents: artifacts that continue to attract a lot of attention.

Placing an emphasis on everyday life allows one to look beyond what are often perfunctorily dismissed as mere routine, mundane, and repetitive practices, more commonly lumped under the disparaging adjective ‘bureaucratic’. Bernstein and Mertz, for instance, make a case for looking at ‘everyday maintenance’ of the state through an investigation of ‘the main occupations of contemporary states: administration, regulation, deregulation’ (2011: 6; also see Gupta 1995).

Different monographs and articles have studied the everyday state with different objectives. For instance, Emma Tarlo studied bureaucracy in India to understand the manner in which the state controlled and managed to repress the memory of one very particular period of Indian history. She is interested in the memory of the gross violation of fundamental rights that occurred during nineteen months (June 1975 to January 1977) of ‘Emergency’ rule when normal democratic operations had been suspended. Veena Das (2005) has studied the Indian state during what appear to be moments of extraordinariness (such as the Emergency or periods of communal violence in India) to powerfully argue that these extraordinary events are not separated out from everyday life.

If Das demonstrates that extraordinary and the everyday are not distinct, other ethnographies have taken the quotidian itself as the object of inquiry. In one iteration of this focus on the quotidian life of bureaucracies, they can assist in making sense of long-term historical trends. For instance, Ilana Feldman directs her gaze onto the everyday writing practices of bureaucracies in Gaza over the period of 1917-1967. Feldman claims that to really comprehend what is seen as the defining date in Palestinian history – the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 – we need to calibrate how this event was managed subsequently, ‘…whether it be the transformation of an ethics of care, the reconfiguration of service bureaucracies, or the development of new forms of documentation’ (2008: 2). Similarly, Chatterji and Mehta (2007) make a case for studying Hindu-Muslim violence in a slum in Mumbai not merely by focusing on the riot or believing that the ‘normal’ life resumes uncomplicatedly once violence ends. They focus, instead, on how the resumption of ‘normalcy’ is crafted through everyday practices such as the setting up of government commissions to investigate the riots, the documentation of the riots in official narratives, the remaking of the space of the slum, the initiation of slum redevelopment programs, and the governmental technologies of rule enacted through extra-governmental bodies such as NGOs.

As even a cursory visit to state bureaucracies in much of the world will immediately make evident, a profound reliance on paper/documents/files is the constitutive feature of bureaucracy. Ethnographies of institutions and organizations (Harper 1997, Riles 2001), states (Stoler 2009, Feldman 2008, Messick 1996), ‘wannabe’-states (Navaro-Yashin 2012), and the increasingly globalised auditing regimes (Hetherington 2011) demonstrate the ubiquity of documentary practices and the manner in which paper underpins action and constitutes legitimised evidence. Matthew Hull (2012) has extended the focus on documents by studying urban governance in Pakistan as a material practice. Within the Pakistani bureaucracy is a great variety of what he terms graphic artefacts: files, office registers, minutes, organizational charts, plans, visiting cards, “chits,” petitions, powers of attorney, memos, letters, revenue records, regulations, reports, policy statements, and office manuals. Through an innovative study of these graphic artefacts and the workings of the urban development authority in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, Hull demonstrates the forms taken on by the planned, modernist city of Islamabad. His work is able to answer concrete questions on the development of Islamabad as a particular type of city as well as the effects of urban planning and relocation for the city residents.

Another recent monograph (Mathur 2016) based in neighbouring India, also centres bureaucratic things and practices as it seeks to answer questions that are often posed for the developmental Indian state: Why is the Indian state incapable of producing desired change despite its beautiful and complex plans/policies/laws; why and how do well-meaning laws produce absurdity or fail in their entirety? Mathur’s ethnography focuses on quotidian bureaucratic practices – reading, writing, lettering, filing, producing and circulating documents, and meetings – and the daily expending of bureaucratic labour on these banal practices through which an anti-poverty statute was executed. Her ethnography demonstrates that the welfare legislation came to a grinding halt not because of corruption, dysfunctionality, inefficiency or low capacity of the Indian state, but rather due to its historically sedimented material and affective bureaucratic practices.

Marthur’s ethnography shows state functioning does not occur mechanically despite that oft-repeated metaphor of the machine of the state, which, with all its connotations of a unitary system working on automaton, is highly misleading. The metaphor of the machine is often applied to the study of development bureaucracies: De Vries described it as ‘a crazy, expansive machine, driven by its capacity to incorporate, refigure and reinvent all sorts of desires for development’ (2007: 37); Nuijten (2004: 211) terms the Mexican bureaucracy a ‘hope-generating machine’ emphasising its capacity to generate hope over its depoliticization effect as famously explored by Ferguson (1990), probably the most famous descriptor of the development apparatus as a machine that produces an anti-politics. Emergent ethnographies of bureaucracies have done much to move away from such machine metaphors to show their contextualised and specific effects. Some of this new ethnographic work on bureaucracy focuses on materiality that goes beyond paper/documents to include, for instance, roads (Harvey and Knox 2015), genealogical charts (Chelcea 2016), and law (Latour 2009). Furthermore, as state bureaucracies the world over have begun experimenting with new technologies and are shifting from what media historian Lisa Gitelman (2014) describes as ‘paper knowledge’ to forms of e-governance, a host of new ethnographies are emerging that depict these new bureaucratic worlds (e.g. Rao & Greenleaf 2013, Breckenridge 2014)

In tandem with the focus on the material culture of bureaucracies, the turn towards studying the role of affect and emotions in political and social life has, also, assisted with a movement away from studying policies or bureaucracies as ‘legal-rational ways of getting things done’ (Wedel et al. 2005: 30) to instead bring out their affective dimensions and socialities (e.g. Bear 2005, Laszczkowski & Reeves 2015). Navaro-Yashin (2012) centres affect in the study of modern bureaucracy. She studies Turkish-Cypriots as they relate to and transact documents produced by several different administrative structures and practices. The Turkish-Cypriots she discusses are subjects and ‘citizens’, since 1983, of an unrecognised state, the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (TRNC), which is considered illegal under international law. In describing how they interact with and respond to state documents, she shows how these material objects of law and governance have an affective underside: they induce ‘panic and fear, wit and irony, cynicism and familiarity’ (2012: 125).

The anthropology of bureaucracy has not just shed light on the operation of states but also, more recently, of global organizations (Sapignoli & Niezen 2017). Ranging from understanding the politics of monitoring at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) (Cowan & Billaud 2015) to how Atlantic bluefin tuna are regulated by a supranational body such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) (Telesca 2015), these emergent ethnographies are opening up new spaces for understanding the effects and functioning of transnational bureaucracies. The anthropology of policy and development is, similarly, beginning to foreground the everyday worlds and labours of development and humanitarian practitioners (e.g. Redfield 2013). This focus on organizational structures and lifeworlds of development bureaucrats in ‘Aidland’ has emerged, Mosse (2013) has cogently argued, due to a dawning recognition that anthropologists need to move away from a mere critical deconstruction of development discourse to a deeper ethnographic exploration of the black box of international development.

Audit and reform

The second broad approach to the anthropology of bureaucracy concentrates its attention not on how bureaucracies function, but rather on how they are monitored, audited, and attempt to transform themselves. One of the earliest collections, Audit cultures, published in 2000 and edited by Marilyn Strathern, focused on the relationship between bureaucracies and neoliberalism, was centred upon practices of auditing and seeking accountability. Strathern wrote,

procedures for assessment have social consequences, locking up time, personnel and resources, as well as locking into the moralities of public management. Yet by themselves audit practices often seem mundane, inevitable parts of a bureaucratic process. It is when one starts putting together a larger picture that they take on the contours of a distinct cultural artifact (2000: 2).

This work, along with the many that followed in its wake (e.g. E. Hull 2012), demonstrates the potency of apparently benign injunctions to ‘reform’ institutions and states on unobjectionable principles – such as making them more accountable to ‘the people’.

Following this line of inquiry, a recent collection of essays has foregrounded the changing form of the public good in its ethnographic study of bureaucracies (Bear & Mathur 2015). A unique characteristic of bureaucracies, after all, is that they exist for the public good. They materialise the redistributive social contract between citizens and the state. A study of public goods acquires particular salience in the contemporary neoliberal period given how they are being pressed into the service of differing organizations the world over. New public goods can be captured in the increasingly strident calls from bureaucrats and citizens for transparency, accountability, fiscal responsibility, austerity, and decentralization. One way to understand bureaucracies, then, is to focus on the discourse and processes of reform and reorganization that is being undertaken in the name of the public good. Ethnographies of transparency reforms in bureaucracies have, for instance, gone far beyond asking how the opaque is made visible to discuss questions of surveillance, effectiveness, knowledge-creation, and even questioning the very desirability of transparency-projects (Ballestero 2012).

It is not just global markets or the everyday worlds of traders and investors that an anthropological approach to bureaucracy can illuminate. In recent years, the neoliberal assault on higher education has produced some interesting studies of the university as a bureaucratic organization situated within and affected by global and national polices. Stefan Collini (2012), for instance, has set forth a particularly compelling critique of the neoliberalising moves of privatising education and the conversion of students into ‘customers’ in the UK. While Collini’s writings relate more broadly to the humanities and to the university as a particular form of a public good that should be cherished and preserved, some important work in anthropology had signalled the dangers of ‘audit cultures’ earlier on. The 2000 collection on audit cultures edited by Strathren as well as The Audit Society (Power 1999) had pointed out that technologies of audit and accountability-generation are not benign practices but tools of neoliberal governmentality, the effects of which are nothing less than coercive for all academics (Shore & Wright 2000, see also Amit 2000 and Fillitz 2000).

Cris Shore & Susan Wright (2000) discussed the rapid and relentless spread of coercive technologies of accountability into higher education in Britain. As they note, audit technologies are not simply innocuously neutral, legal-rational practices: rather, they are instruments for new forms of governance and power. Audit, these anthropologists have argued, must be understood not simply in terms of whether it meets its professed aims and objectives, but in terms of its political functions as a technology of neoliberal governance. A more recent volume of essays pushes this argument further afield to Asia Pacific and Europe to ask if we are now witnessing the death of the public university (Shore & Wright 2017). It focuses on the series of reforms that have been forced upon Universities since the 1980s with particular attention paid to the more recent scramble from higher rankings and utilization of metrics that can measure ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’ in higher education.

In a powerful 2004 address to the American Anthropological Association, Don Brenneis had made the call for anthropologists to study their own bureaucratic institutions as anthropologists and to stop bracketing out important practices, such as the manner in which donor organizations make funding decisions. As he succinctly put it, ‘before one can… “write culture” one must write money for an audience of one’s peers’ (2004: 582). His ethnography of the National Science Foundation (NSF) brings to light a number of important findings, key among them the notion of ‘panel civility’ that disallows panellists from making what could be seen as ‘controversial decisions’ and instead rewards conservative proposals, thus limiting the possibilities of greater anthropological creativity. The call was renewed by the 2017 American Ethnological Society presidential address that, too, laments the absence of enough critical ethnographic ‘homework’ into their own bureaucratic university settings by anthropologists (Gusterson 2017).

In a further turning of a critical anthropological lens onto anthropology departments in Euro-America, the development and strengthening of a flagrantly exploited underclass of academics has been variously described as ‘academic apartheid’ (Unger 1995: 117), ‘the new internal colonialism’ (Giacomo 2010), and ‘a prestige economy’ (Kendizor 2015). These writers, amongst others, have pointed out how higher education is becoming a smaller, more elite club with anthropology departments cutting permanent posts and relying increasingly on and exploiting the labour of never-to-be-tenured adjunct staff. The political-economic changes that have allowed for this state of things are now well documented (see Kendizor 2015). The irony of anthropology as a discipline that prides itself on uncovering structural inequalities in ‘other’ places (the ‘field’) and yet being complicit in perpetuating increasingly exploitative conditions, especially for the younger generation of anthropologists, has not escaped attention. These studies, once again, demonstrate the political possibilities inherent in a deeper analysis of the working of bureaucracies; in this case those very bureaucracies that academics are immersed in.

Banality and boredom

Beyond Weberian (mis)readings, bureaucracy posed a series of more profound problems to anthropology as a discipline with ethnography as its primary method. In the first place, anthropology has been known to be pre-occupied with the remote, exotic, and the Other. Bureaucracy not only is none of these, but it is also something that anthropologists as professional academics are themselves deeply steeped in. Riles (2001) has described as the ‘achingly familiar’ practices of bureaucratic institutions the world over. She notes that when she was writing up her doctoral research she was struck by the similarities between her own practices as an academic and those of the bureaucracies she studied in Fiji. She argued that these similarities directed our attention to a problem of anthropological analysis that does not inhere in our encounter with knowledge practices ‘outside’ our own, but rather is endemic to the ‘inside’ of modern institutional and academic analysis – the production of funding proposals, the collection of data, the drafting of documents, or the attendance of meetings. Given their own immersion in bureaucratic worlds, anthropologists have up until quite recently tended to not consider it ‘Other-enough’ to warrant serious attention.

Secondly, bureaucracy is often dismissed as too boring to be of any value. David Graeber (2006), for instance, has explored the question of why anthropologists study rituals surrounding births, deaths, marriages, and other rites of passages but not the daily rituals of bureaucratic practices. Neglecting these rituals is particularly puzzling, in Graeber’s perspective, given the anthropologists’ traditional concern with socially efficacious ritual gestures ‘where the mere act of saying or doing something makes it socially true. Yet in most existing societies at this point, it is precisely paperwork, not other forms of ritual, that is socially efficacious’ (2006: 3). Graeber provides an ‘obvious answer’ to this question: ‘The obvious answer is that paperwork is boring. There aren’t many interesting things one can say about it’. The clinching argument for the boredom of paperwork and associated bureaucracies is that, with the notable exception of Kafka, they remain largely absent from ‘great literature’, for ‘there’s so little there that once you’ve done it, there’s nothing left for anyone to add’ (Graeber 2006: 3).^[1]

Perhaps it is not boredom or an absence of things to say, as much as the difficulty in the crafting of a language to capture the banality and to express the everyday operations of bureaucracies. Indeed, such representational acts seem to be possible in their putatively fictionalised form. Thus, Kafka’s writings gave birth to an adjective – Kafkaesque – on the basis of his singular capacity to turn ‘bureaucracy into a political grotesque – a grotesquerie that is abysmally comic’ (Corngold 2009: 8). Orwell, another superb observer of bureaucracies, invented a whole new vocabulary to describe its characteristics: newspeak, think police, thoughtcrime, etc. What is required then is the crafting of a new language, one that can ethnographically capture the banality of bureaucracy (Mathur 2016). As this entry has argued, the benefits of such a new ethnographic language and practice are potentially enormous: ranging from understanding the functioning of postcolonial welfare states to a new perspective on contemporary global public goods of transparency and accountability to the very meaning of a university in Britain or the United States.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the anthropology of bureaucracy is capable of shedding new light on urgent matters of global concern – including migration, governance, poverty, austerity, precarity – and serves as a powerful example of the distinctive power of ethnography to explain the world in new ways. It also pushes anthropologists to refine their craft and devise new ways to make even the most ordinary social world accessible to its readers. Taken to its fullest potential, the anthropological study of bureaucracy doesn’t just help us make sense of the Other – the founding object of study of the discipline. Rather, it helps us make sense of those things, like universities and academic professionalism, which are all too familiar.

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Orwell, G. 1948. Burmese days. London: Secker & Warburg.

Pels, P. 2000. The trickster's dilemma: ethics and the technologies of the anthropological self. In Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy (ed.) M. Strathern, 135-72. New York: Routledge.

Power, M. 1999. The audit society: rituals of verification. Oxford: University Press.

Redfield, P. 2013. Life in crisis: the ethical journey of Doctors without Borders. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Riles, A. 2001. The network inside out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

——— 2006. [Deadlines]: removing the bracket on politics in bureaucratic and anthropological analysis. In Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge (ed.) A. Riles, 71-92. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sharma, A. & A. Gupta 2006. Introduction: rethinking theories of the state in an age of globalisation. In The anthropology of the state: a reader (eds) A. Sharma & A. Gupta, 1-42. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Shore, C. & S. Wright 2000. Coercive accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education. In Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and the academy (ed.) M. Strathern, 57-89. New York: Routledge.

Shore, C. & S. Wright (eds) 2017. Death of the public university? Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy. New York: Berghahn Press.

Stoler, A.L. 2009. Along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2000. Introduction: new accountabilities. In Audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy (ed.) M. Strathern, 1-18. New York: Routledge.

——— 2006. Bullet-proofing: a tale from the United Kingdom. In Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge (ed.) A. Riles, 181-205. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Tarlo, E. 2000. Paper truths: the Emergency and slum clearance through forgotten files. In The everyday state and society in modern India (eds) C. Fuller & V. Benei, 68-90. Delhi: Social Science Press.

Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

——— 2002 [1922]. Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Nayanika Mathur is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paper tiger: law, bureaucracy and the developmental state in Himalayan India (Cambridge, 2016) and the co-editor of Remaking the public good: a new anthropology of bureaucracy (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2015).

Dr Nayanika Mathur, Schools of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, 12 Bevington Road, Oxford, OX2 6LH, United Kingdom. nm289@cam.ac.uk.

[1] Previously Lévi-Strauss had altogether cut out ‘that-which-is-written’ from the study of anthropology. He considered the primary function of writing to be the facilitation of ‘the enslavement of other human beings’, and had asserted half a century back that ‘Ethnology is especially interested in what is not written. [It deals with what is] different from everything that men usually dream of engraving in stone or committing to paper’ (quoted in Stoler 2009).

Citizenship

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Sian Lazar

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16citizenship

Abstract:

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about institutions of government, the right to vote and be elected, etc. Yet at its most fundamental, citizenship names political belonging, and here I argue that to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community.

Introduction

The sociologist T.H. Marshall gave the following definition of citizenship in 1950:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall 1983 [1950]: 253).

He equated community with the nation, and viewed membership of that community as primarily an individual ownership of a set of rights and corresponding duties. His version of citizenship has a distinguished pedigree: from Locke onwards, liberal citizenship has been seen as a status of the individual. The rights associated with this status in theory allow individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good life, as long as they do not hinder other’s similar pursuits, and the state protects this status quo. In return, citizens have minimal responsibilities, which revolve primarily around keeping the state running, such as paying taxes, or participating in military service.

However, liberal citizenship is not the only form of citizenship that we can find globally. Indeed, insights from ethnography complicate this normative picture of liberal citizenship, as anthropologists have insisted on the specificity of citizenship in different contexts. Alternative possibilities might be civic republican or communitarian forms of citizenship. This is because political membership is related in complex ways to day-to-day practices of politics, and citizenship is a mechanism for making claims on different political communities, of which the state is just one. One important consequence of this is that anthropologists denaturalize liberal citizenship and ask questions about the actual constitution of political membership and subjectivity in a given context. In the move from political philosophy to anthropology, we see an important analytical shift take place from the normative to the descriptive: from what citizenship and citizens should be to a critical analysis of what they are.

The political community

The concept of citizenship has a long trajectory within political philosophy. Like anthropologists, political philosophers ask: how should we live with others in a political community? Here I trace some key moments in this enduring debate within political philosophy, a debate which informs most anthropological discussions of citizenship today. Aristotle (2013) is my starting point, as the most celebrated proponent of a civic republican tradition of citizenship that began in the early Greek city states. In the Politics, he discusses three very important issues: first, the question of how precisely to constitute membership – and exclusion; second, the nature of the citizen as person; and third, the nature of politics itself. The first question of membership was a particular problem in early Greek philosophical thought because of the presence of slaves, often in important bureaucratic positions in the government of the city. Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that ‘man is a political animal’ was not an inclusive one, but referred only to certain men, those who were not slaves (women were quickly dismissed and then ignored, along with children). He described the citizen: a member of the political community (polis) who participates in government in the sense that he ‘gives judgement and holds office’. Secondly, Aristotle discussed in great depth the development of the citizen as a particular kind of man capable of living in the collectivity, who held and cultivated the associated virtues, such as respect for law and for others and a passion for politics. Finally, politics itself was intimately linked with speech in Aristotle’s thought. Discussion and debate were absolutely central to Athenian politics and personhood. So, citizenship was constituted through political practice, and political practice was constituted through speech and deliberation.

The key points here are, first, that citizenship is more than simply a status denoting membership of a polity but is constituted through a set of practices associated with participation in politics. Second, political subjectivity is something that cannot be assumed to exist but that must be created. For Aristotle, political subjects – citizens – are inherently collective and also eminently moral.

The second set of foundational philosophical texts I want to highlight are those of the social contract philosophers and the Liberal tradition. For Rousseau and Locke, social order can only be achieved through the acceptance of all to live via the agreement of the majority for the benefit of all. This is principally in order to protect property rights, as in the state of ‘natural freedom’ (Rousseau 1971) prior to the establishment of a state, property is always subject to the threat of what Locke called ‘the Invasion of others’. To overcome this danger each individual ‘puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will’, thus creating ‘civil freedom’ (Rousseau 1971). The political community therefore comes into being when individuals voluntarily subject themselves to the collectivity (meaning the state and the rule of law). As with Aristotle, political subjectivity is not to be assumed, but is created, and is intimately linked to moral questions of personal virtue. The American Declaration of Independence^[1] (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man^[2] (1789) were more radical, in their willingness to question the inevitability of the existing regime of state power and sovereignty; and then to claim sovereignty for ‘the people’. They did so by claiming the equality of men (sic.) in the name of individual rights, especially those to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. The political context meant that they needed to claim liberty so that they could change sovereign power, but liberty could also be interpreted in the light of Rousseau and Locke’s position that true freedom comes through the respect for the rule of law, not through the absence of law (for Locke, see his Two Treatises of Government, 2003).

The question of property was also fundamental for the authors of these Declarations, and the role of the state as guarantor of individual property rights became a central question of citizenship in Republican and Liberal regimes from the late eighteenth century on. In the first place, property was a fundamental criterion for membership, as only male property holders were defined as citizens. But also questions of property-holding often created practical difficulties for the implementation of individual, universal ideals of citizenship. For example, Latin American constitutions and legislation of the nineteenth century often attempted to abolish collective land-holding in favour of individual property rights, but this proved very unpopular, especially for indigenous communities in the region. For example, Andean communities were less keen on equal individual rights as defined by their rules, than they were on retaining customary forms of land-holding that protected their members and shared out access to resources (Platt 1984). Anthropologists have done a great deal to illuminate our understanding of the complexities of these processes in the contemporary world, giving due import to their historical, economic, and political background.

In the dominant Liberal narrative of the nineteenth century, liberty of one’s own person would be achieved through citizenship based on individual rights, which superseded institutions perceived as backward, such as slavery or collective property-holding. However, in practice, citizenship was continually negotiated, and collective traditions were not peculiar only to indigenous communities. In fact, the historical development of citizenship is linked to the coalescing of modern nation-states (which often took liberal forms) out of earlier city-state formations built on civic republican traditions. But even the most radical of modern nation-states mixed the two traditions of citizenship together.

One common aspect of both traditions has been the inherent connection of citizenship to exclusion from membership. The exclusion of women from liberal citizenship was denounced from its beginnings by early feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges. Contemporary feminist political philosophers, historians, and other social theorists also point out that the ‘abstract’ individual citizen of Liberal ideals turns out to be in fact a very particular kind of white male property-holding individual citizen.

The debate about the abstract individual of contemporary Liberalism has provoked responses from communitarian political philosophers as well as from feminists. Both emphasize the embedding of subjects within collectivities; they recognize that in real life we are not merely individual subjects or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1984). Rather, and now I use more anthropological language, we are part of a whole network of social relations of care, obligation, rights, kinship, and so on.

However, as anthropologists are only too well aware, a community is not always welcoming and egalitarian. Feminist and queer political theorists, among others, have pointed out how the notion of community often leaves little space for individual variability. More importantly, it hides from view the internal power relations that constrain the ability to define what ‘a community’ is and what ‘it’ thinks best. Who speaks for ‘a’ community? Are any communities so homogeneous as to suppress difference within them, and what does that mean for their members?

For anthropologists, this is a crucial point, which has come out in debates as varied as those centred on individual or collective notions of the self, the interplay between ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ legal jurisdictions and national ones, human rights and property rights, and the practice of ‘development’. While many anthropologists have felt an affinity with subaltern groups and so have defended group rights from a perspective of cultural relativism, it has long been acknowledged that societal and legal recognition of group rights may inhibit individual claims to justice. Anthropological study takes the discussion beyond abstract principles, not least through the recognition that conflicts between group rights and legal regimes that are based upon Liberal notions of individual rights often happen in grey zones imbued with complex power relations. Examples of these grey zones are issues of land rights and the exploitation of natural resources.

In a classically liberal approach, individual rights constitute citizenship of the national political community and group rights undermine that civic belonging; while in political thought more influenced by communitarianism, smaller communities define their members. Contemporary liberals have modified the first position, to argue for liberal versions of community membership that protect both individual and group rights. Yet the tension remains largely unresolved. Anthropology’s distinctive disciplinary history and methodological approach, relying as it does on comparisons between different kinds of cultural, social, and economic practices, means that anthropologists are well placed to explore these contrasting notions of political community in both urban and rural spaces.

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

When we study how citizenship operates in different contexts, we see that political subject formation is a key element. Ethnographic work shows that political subject formation happens through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Aihwa Ong summed up this insight in an important early article, when she suggested that citizenship is a ‘process of self-making and being-made’ (1996: 737).

One prominent thread in the anthropology of citizenship uses a Foucauldian analysis to examine how states and other entities make citizens under various citizenship regimes. To research this, we can examine encounters between people and state officials or policy, and one area where a considerable amount of work of this type has been done is in immigration. Immigration is perhaps where boundaries between citizen and non-citizen are most contested, but immigration encounters are not solely punitive and exclusionary: governments also put in a lot of work to ‘assimilate’ different groups of migrants and refugees.

The interaction between assimilation and respect for difference was investigated early on through the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, first brought to an anthropological audience by Renato Rosaldo. For Rosaldo, cultural citizenship ‘refers to the right to be different (in terms of race, ethnicity or native language) with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong, in the sense of participating in the nation-state’s democratic processes’ (1994: 57). In a series of research and activist projects with Latino immigrants to the US, he and his collaborators discussed immigrants’ experiences of second-class citizenship, and their struggles for better citizenship quality, which they often defined in terms of respect and dignity. He firmly located the struggle for cultural citizenship within a political struggle for rights in the face of exclusionary definitions of national identity.

State policies towards immigrants are not the only form of cultural citizenship regime in operation today. By citizenship regime, I refer to legal, bureaucratic, ideological, and material frameworks that condition practices of, and ideas about, government and participation in politics. States and NGOs all attempt to construct particular kinds of citizen, in policy areas such as development intervention globally and welfare policy at home.

One of the most important ways that states create citizens is education – or, better, schooling. National schooling systems have long been recognised as central to the development of national identity and civic commitment. Although so closely associated with nation-building projects, today education is transnational, and a key area for development intervention: from provision of universal primary education to human rights education programmes, for example. Still, the virtues promoted through schooling vary from country to county, valuing different languages, bodily and emotional dispositions. Schooling may create specific kinds of citizens explicitly through civics classes but also in the ways that pupil–teacher relationships are constructed and students’ bodies disciplined. They may promote certain gender roles, a hierarchical relationship with authority or a commitment to democracy as a value in itself. Schooling is always a moral project, even when that moral quality is hidden behind seemingly technocratic language as with the example of ‘human capital’. However, schools may not always succeed in producing the kinds of citizens envisaged by dominant ideologies, and anthropological analysis is very good at exposing the unintended consequences of educational policies.

Education continues to be inherent to citizenship, whether implemented through schooling or political participation, participation in local voluntary projects, or citizenship classes for immigrants. Other cultural and moral projects of citizenship construction include those that produce the citizen as consumer – of public services, goods, lifestyles; as knowledge worker in the information economy; as auditor of transparent government; as soldier or ex-soldier. These projects work in the interface between people, policy, markets, and the state.

Importantly, though, the processes of subject construction are not only top-down. Ordinary people frame and make claims of the state – for example, for disability benefits for those affected by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Petryna 2002), or for regularization of land titles in the peripheral neighbourhoods of São Paulo (Holston 2008). These studies bring out the complex relationships between people and state bureaucracy, and between people and law. The room for manoeuvre that citizens enjoy is not completely free, but constrained by legal and political regimes.

Citizen action is also shaped by the languages of political action available to actors. In some spaces, the processes of claims-making are articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand antiretroviral treatment from the state. The language of citizenship as a means of articulating claims usually names a claim to rights: rights to medical treatment, to legalization of property, to self-government, etc. As a result, for many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, the link between citizenship claims-making and rights is irrefutable and exclusive.

However, although the connection between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is in fact linked to languages of rights in quite specific political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership (i.e. citizenship) can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations, or the naturalized membership of a collectivity. This may reflect a non-liberal vision of citizenship. The recognition of languages of citizenship other than that of rights opens up analytical space for research into non-normative citizenship formations themselves.

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

People are members of varying political communities, not just those governed by national or even local states, and they are subject to forms of government that originate from different entities. Therefore, although citizenship is classically considered as related to the state, anthropological study reveals that this applies under particular political conditions of belonging, but is not always the case. This is especially evident when we take globalization into account. Given the contemporary importance of transnational and sometimes global political entities such as corporations or religious networks in the government of citizens of different nation-states, can we argue that citizenship is merely the relationship between the individual and the state? If we wish to argue that citizenship is participation in government, in the taking of decisions that affect our lives, then the citizen’s position regarding a range of governing entities becomes crucial in an assessment of the quality of his or her citizenship under a given political regime.

For most citizens, the dominant political community is the nation-state. In practice, though, there is no reason to yoke citizenship solely to the nation-state, and indeed we should question the scale at which we perceive a given political community.

In early modern Europe, the dominant political community was the city, and today some of the most relevant political communities of advanced capitalism operate on a supra-national scale. This may be global, as in the ideas of cosmopolitanism, world citizenship and human rights, but also transnational as for activist groups, citizen-migrants, diasporic groups and religious networks. Work on transnational migrants links many of the questions of citizenship discussed here, including membership, nationality, identity, cultural citizenship, and political practice.

As with the transnational dimension, local citizenship of the city is of equal theoretical importance to citizenship of the nation. David Harvey (2012) has argued that claiming the right to define the city is a crucial contemporary site for resistance to capital. Such action may not simply be urban protest or social movements, but may also be citizens making a life for themselves in the city. Urban public spheres include the streets, where people demonstrate and work, but also the many forms of association where citizens negotiate the building and defining of society, even act violently towards one another. Thus, the location for the practices of citizenship is a key question for the analysis of citizenship. The logical realm for political action for most citizens has always been their local area, and people are often suspicious of those who choose to extend their political action beyond that, and become professional politicians rather than citizens. Through ethnography we can examine which political collectivities are important in citizens’ lives at any given time and place.

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

However we define the political community, though, it is clear that citizenship as a language names membership. It is also a means of claiming membership, and commenting on the quality (or content, extent) of membership, as we can see when people make distinctions between full- and second-class citizenship or formal and substantive citizenship.^[3] Liberal citizenship has held out the promise of universal equality achieved through universal formal citizenship, at least for particular categories of persons; but despite this promise, citizenship regimes have developed differently in different historical contexts.

Holston (2008) shows how Brazilian citizenship developed historically as differentiated, but suggests that occupants of peripheral settlements of São Paulo have challenged their differential treatment from the mid-twentieth century onwards by claiming citizenship rights to property. They do so by struggling to legalize their homes, which have been built on land that was first occupied illegally. Holston calls this an ‘insurgent citizenship’, and their demand to legalize property ownership is a claim to hold rights just like elite citizens do. There is an irony here, since land-holding has been one of the most important aspects of citizen inequality in Brazil throughout its history.

Rights claims have been a feature of campaigns by other, more organized, social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially since the 1990s. Specifically, the concept of citizenship has been used in campaigns by indigenous, feminist, urban, and LGBTQ+^[4] social movement activists, who demand that they be recognized as active social subjects with the right to have rights and – crucially – the right to define what those rights are. This is a claim to participate in government and decision-making; to participate in political processes too often closed to these groups.

As non-citizens claim citizenship, or second-class citizens claim full citizenship, the nature of citizenship itself changes. Indeed, often the struggle for inclusion (or against exclusion) is what changes the nature of the political system. This could be by creating new laws or constitutions, new categories of people and political subjects, or by changing public opinion. Social and political practices of membership are a crucial part of this dynamic.

But if citizenship is a means of claiming membership or better quality membership, it is also a means of excluding others from that membership or shaping them in contrast to the normative citizen. Citizenship is constituted by both the virtue of the individual citizen as political actor and the nature of political practice. Recognising that non-citizens are excluded from the political community can lead to a positive politics of dissent and resistance and to the broadening of citizenship, but the ‘othering’ can also be highly restrictive, not to say violent.

The archetypal non-citizen is the foreign migrant, but ‘migrant’ is in practice not a simple identity category, not least because migration is often constituted within the force field of colonial and neo-colonial relations. The transformation from colonial subject to imperial citizen and then immigrant other is the outcome of a set of political choices that have a history. Most migrants have travelled to their host country for reasons of labour, and restrictions on their citizenship status that keep them as resident aliens often enable exploitation in the form of low wages and poor working conditions. They are especially vulnerable to abuse by state officials and, where migrants are kept wholly illegal, they are subject to the insecurity of constant risk of deportation. Culturally, the presence of ‘outsiders’ within an imagined ‘national body’ is often not constituted as a problem for the dominant group of citizens, but for the non-citizens themselves. They become ciphers, representing threat, hypersexuality, cultural backwardness, or diversity and multiculturalism (e.g., Partridge 2008). They are marked out, subject to discrimination and racism, which persists even when they have become fully legal citizens, over generations.

Such operations of sovereignty are the other side of the coin to the operations of top-down subject creation discussed earlier. They may become violent, as when groups use languages of native belonging to justify attacks on others, who are seen as migrant interlopers regardless of long-standing histories of mobility and transnationalism. Thus, as boundaries are drawn between citizens and non-citizens, and legal frameworks mobilized to emphasize one group’s otherness, the status of citizen and non-citizen can become hardened, and citizenship restricted not amplified.

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

One of the results of recent developments in the anthropology of citizenship has been a proliferation of new concepts which work by adding a qualifying adjective to the term citizenship. Scholars have studied biological citizenship, flexible citizenship, agrarian citizenship, insurgent citizenship, therapeutic citizenship, urban citizenship, pharmaceutical citizenship, formal and substantive citizenship, etc. The qualifying adjective is important, because it recognises the diversity of citizenship today and acknowledges that liberal citizenship is one form among many. However, in the proliferation of adjectives we still risk assuming that we know what citizenship itself is, that the key is the ‘biological’, ‘urban’, ‘differentiated’ aspect, and that citizenship does not require explanation as a concept in its own right. Indeed, we should be wary of all essentialisms and acknowledge that ‘liberal citizenship’ must itself be plural, as attested by the varieties of liberalism both in historical reality and political thought.

At its most elemental, a focus on citizenship is a way of approaching the political, and one of the most exciting anthropological contributions to the debate is the way that we come to put into question the normative formulations of citizenship and explore the languages and practices of political membership, agency, and constitution of varied political communities, without assuming Liberal parameters for either. However, we must be careful, for two reasons. First, although it is important to take a critical position to normative understandings of citizenship, we do risk ending up in an enclave of cultural relativism where the only argument we can make is that citizenship there is different from citizenship here. While this is undoubtedly an important argument, anthropology has significantly more to contribute to our understanding of citizenship. Second, we should not lose sight of the political implications of such a strategy. Studying citizenship as political practice often obliges us to take a political stand, whether that be alongside those advocating for rights at individual or group level, or critical of mainstream (or even counter-hegemonic) notions of citizenship.

Nonetheless, if we recognize that from time to time our view of what citizenship is can be heavily coloured by a normative assumption about what it should be, we are then better placed to see how citizenship is configured in practice, and to explore the historical, material, and cultural reasons for that configuration.

References

Aristotle, 2013 [1984]. Politics (trans. C. Lord). Chicago: University Press.

Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: University Press.

Locke, J. 2003. Two treatises of government and a letter concerning toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marshall, T.H. 1983 [1950]. Citizenship and social class. In States and societies (ed.) D. Held, 248-60. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ong, A. 1996. Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37, 737-62.

Partridge, D. 2008. We were dancing in the club, not on the Berlin Wall: black bodies, street bureaucrats, and exclusionary incorporation into the New Europe. Cultural Anthropology 23, 660-87.

Petryna, A. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: University Press.

Platt, T. 1984. Liberalism and ethnocide in the Southern Andes. History Workshop Journal 17, 3-18.

Rosaldo, R. 1994. Cultural citizenship in San Jose, California, PoLAR 17, 57-63.

Rousseau, J.J. 1971 [1782] The Social Contract (trans. M. Cranston). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Sandel, M. 1984. The procedural republic and the unencumbered self. Political Theory 12, 81-96.

Note on contributor

Sian Lazar is author of El Alto, rebel city: self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of The anthropology of citizenship: a reader (Wiley, 2013). She works on social movements, political activism, and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina.

Dr Sian Lazar, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sl360@cam.ac.uk

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration

[2] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

[3] Substantive citizenship is the ability that citizens have in reality to claim rights that they possess through their formal status as citizen: ‘formal membership, based on principles of incorporation in to the nation-state’ contrasts with ‘the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens’ (Holston 2008: 7).

[4] LGBTQ+ is an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of gender identities, sexual orientations and romantic orientations that experience discrimination.

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Education

Surveillance

Introduction

Security, policing, and morality

Health surveillance and care

Monitoring labour

Participatory surveillance

Non-surveillance

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Note on contributors

References

Literacy

Introduction

Literacy and pre-literature

Working through the dichotomies: primitive/civilised and oral/literate

Literacy as a sociocultural practice

An anthropology of literacy education

Multilingualism and literacy education

Re-imagining literacy in a digital world

Conclusion

References

Note on contributors

Metrics

Introduction

Social sciences of metrology

An anthropology of metrics

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

References

Note on contributor

Childhood

Introduction: children and ‘childhood’

Socialization: becoming a cultural person

Knowledge and learning

Formal schooling and new models of childhood

Problematising child rights

The politics of childhood

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Bureaucracy

Introduction

Governance

Audit and reform

Banality and boredom

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Citizenship

Introduction

The political community

Anthropological approaches: (i) citizenship as subject formation

Anthropological approaches: (ii) where are our political communities?

Anthropological approaches: (iii) membership and exclusion

Taking a fresh look at citizenship

Further reading

References

Note on contributor