Policy Worlds Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power [Hardcover]

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

Cris Shoreis Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The editors break new ground in offering policy as one lifeline to anthropologists struggling to give shape to multi-sited ethnography&This book achieves what it sets out to do. These accounts show that policy is good to think with, that theories of ?governmentality should encompass contestation to be convincing, and that policy deserves further study.? Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

The book offers both unsettling and highly inspirational reading material, especially for academics emerging from the worlds metropolises. It raises issues that are frequently overlooked and which represent unavoidable starting points for those doing anthropology today in the Antipodes and elsewhere.? Social Anthropologie/Anthropologie sociale

This volume offers an indispensable point of reference for any methodological and theoretlӢ