A number of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. They were pulled over by police officers for speeding or caught by random inspection without a driver’s license. For United States government commissions and the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. For some police officers though, they were of personal and professional significance. These officers replayed the incidents of contact with the 19 men, which lay bare the uncertainty of every (...) encounter, whether a traffic stop, or with someone taking photos of a landmark. Representatives from law enforcement began to design policies to include local police in national intelligence, with the idea of capitalizing on what patrol officers already do in dealing with the general public. Several initiatives were launched, among these, the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. Routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for gathering, assessing and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and recent scholarship on it, this chapter discusses prevention, preemption, and anticipation as three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, this analysis suggests, is an anticipatory technology which constitutes police officers and intelligence analysts as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty. (shrink)

In this article, we explore some of the roles of cameras in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we suggest that there are important intersections between this video footage and police subjectivity, and propose to look at two: recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law Enforcement Academy (...) and the Seattle Police Department’s body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role of key visual technologies in contemporary media activism in Brazil. Drawing on a range of media formats and sources, it examines how the aesthetic politics of activists in protests that took place in 2013 opened the way for wider sociopolitical change. The forms and practices of the media activists, it is argued, aimed explicitly at producing transformative politics. New media technologies were remediated as a kind of equipment that could generate new relationships and subjectivities, and (...) thereby access to intentionally undetermined futures. (shrink)

This chapter examines global policing as it takes shape through the work of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Global policing emerges in the legal, political and technological amalgam through which transnational police cooperation is carried out, and includes the police practices inflected and made possible by this phenomenon. Interpol’s role is predominantly in the circulation of information, through which it enters into relationships and provides services that affect aspects of governance, from the local to national, regional and global. The (...) chapter describes this assemblage as a noteworthy experiment in developing what McKeon called a frame for common action. Drawing on Interpol publications, news stories, interviews with staff, and fieldwork at the General Secretariat in Lyon, France, the history, institutional structure, and daily practices are described. Three cases are analyzed, concerning Red Notices, national sovereignty, and terrorism, in order to explore some of the problems arising in Interpol’s political and technical operating arrangements. In conclusion, international and global policing are compared schematically, together with Interpol’s attempts to give institutional and procedural direction to the still-evolving form of global policing. (shrink)

This article explores the process of “re-imagined scenarios,” through which the moments of contact with the 9/11 hijackers were developed into scenarios that came to play a central role in U.S. counterterrorism training and policy. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with trainers, government officials, and police officers, it is argued that these scenarios do not recreate previous encounters, or conjure up possible futures, but instead rely on “the elasticity of the almost” to reactivate the past. The re-imagined scenarios call forth (...) "a certain array of recognizable elastic points," through which options for alternative movements are invented. (shrink)

In our study of U.S. counterterrorism programs, we found that anthropology needs a mode of analysis that considers security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the very heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. This article first presents a genealogy for the anthropology of security, and identifies four main approaches: violence and State terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as “security analytics.” Security analytics moves away from studying security formations, (...) and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As a framework for anthropological inquiry, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We then illustrate this approach through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter extremism. In each of our cases, we use security analytics to arrive at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of conceptual distinctions that we propose as an aid to approaching empirical situations and the study of security is, on another level, a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice for every situation. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary U.S. security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems. (shrink)

Making “the familiar strange and the strange familiar” is what anthropology has long claimed as its expertise. The Internet and its broader technological problem space pose methodological challenges, however, for a discipline that has traditionally drawn on the authority of “being there” to ground its claims to knowledge.

We have two goals in this paper: first, to provide a diagnosis of global health and underline some of its blockages; second, to offer an alternative interpretation of what the demands for those in global health may be. The assumption that health is a good that requires no further explanation, and that per se it can serve as an actual modus operandi, lays the foundations of the problem. Related blockages ensue and are described using HIV prevention with a focus on (...) vaginal microbicides as a case study. Taking health as a self-evident, and self-explanatory “good” limits other possible goods; and prevents inquiry into the actual practices of creating good. We propose that to create conditions under which global health could be reconstructed, problematization be taken up as a practice, around a series of questions asked in conjunction with those ever-urgent ones of how to ameliorate the condition of living beings. (shrink)

Neste capítulo, analisa-se a documentação visual dos protestos de 2013, contrastando a cobertura da grande mídia em São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro com a de ativistas usando as tecnologias de nova mídia. Os temas centrais são a forma como o exercício do poder político é mediado através de novas tecnologias de mídia e a racionalidade política que anima os ativistas. Dito de outro modo, pergunta-se: por que os atores criaram imagens da forma que o fizeram e que objetivos políticos (...) estavam em jogo? No que se segue, consideram-se principalmente as utilizações de filmagens feitas à mão com telefone celular, a difusão de tais imagens pelas redes sociais (mídia social) e a interação entre os ativistas e os governos municipais. Sugere-se que as novas tecnologias de mídia, através da qual a linguagem visual dos ativistas foi criada, eram postas a serviço de um tipo de política radical, no sentido de almejar algo diferente na raiz. Em vez de um modo de ação política com objetivos governamentais definitivos, os ativistas re-mediaram novas tecnologias de mídia como um tipo de equipamento que poderia gerar novas relações e subjetividades e, assim, acesso a um futuro intencionalmente indeterminado. (shrink)

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set time-bound targets that are powerful shapers of how and for whom health is pursued. In this paper we examine some ramifications of both the temporal limitation, and maternal-child health targeting of MDG 4 and 5. The 2015 end date may encourage increasing the number of mass campaigns to meet the specific MDG objectives, potentially to the detriment of a more comprehensive approach to health. We discuss some ethical, political, and pragmatic ramifications of this tendency, (...) and show that these are not unique to the MDGs but rather have a long history in health policy debates. We also examine attempts to counter a narrow focus on vertical interventions in campaigns through integrated health system delivery platforms. We argue that the way forward is not to assume that evidence is value free, but rather to make explicit the political and ethical decisions in the design of metrics and evaluation research. We propose an index of five factors that should be included in research designed to inform decision making about providing interventions as part of routine services or periodic campaigns, toward serving more members of the population, and long-term strengthening of the health system via integrated health interventions. (shrink)

What are the actual practices of intellectual co-laboring? In the spring of 2006, we began an experiment in collaborative anthropology. There was a dual impetus to our efforts: a desire to deal head-on with inadequacies in our academic environment; and a strong feeling that the classic norms of qualitative inquiry needed to become contemporary. Collaboration struck us as potentially key to both. We drew a parallel to laboratory experiments. In the textbook version, one begins with a question, formulates a hypothesis, (...) then tests it by adapting or inventing techniques and practicing them. With a certain irony, we nicknamed our experiment the “labinar,” lab plus seminar. From the beginning, we understood the “labinar” as an experiment in venue construction and form. We understood it as an intervention into pedagogic practice, as well as anthropological inquiry. Our reasoning was that the world is different than it was when the standards of qualitative human or social science became codified in the heyday of traditional anthropological fieldwork. (shrink)

O trabalho analisa o patrimônio etnobotânico da feira livre, com base em um estudo feito no bairro da Tijuca, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Durante dois anos de trabalho de campo com quatro ervatários, que tinham média de 15 anos de experiência, foram coletados plantas e dados sobre nomes vulgares, usos e o preparo dos remédios. A coleta resultou em 151 espécies distribuídas em 59 famílias, de procedência diversa: comprada de terceiros, cultivada nos jardins particulares dos vendedores, ruderal, e (...) coletada da Mata Atlântica (40%). Analisa-se o papel das plantas na saúde e na vida religiosa das pessoas do bairro, o conhecimento dos ervatários e a coleta das plantas da Mata Atlântica. (shrink)

Este trabalho procura documentar as espécies e os usos de plantas vendidas por ervatários numa feira semanal do bairro da Tijuca na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Foi realizado entre os meses de agosto/98 e agosto/99, e participaram da pesquisa quatro vendedores, com média de 15 anos de experiência no mercado, fornecendo as plantas e informações sobre seus nomes vulgares, usos e o preparo dos remédios. A feira foi visitada regularmente e os espécimes encontrados foram coletados, fotografados, herborizados e identificados (...) através da consulta de livros, chaves e especialistas, e comparação com exemplares de herbário. A coleta resultou em 151 espécies distribuídas em 59 famílias, a melhor representada sendo Asteraceae (21), Lamiaceae (13), Solanaceae (9), Leguminosae (6), e as restantes representadas por até 5 espécies. As plantas foram classificadas em 4 categorias segundo a procedência: comprada de terceiros (16%), cultivada nos jardins particulares dos vendedores (23%), ruderal (21%), e coletada da Mata Atlântica (40%). Foram documentadas 60 utilidades medicinais e rituais, e 15 formas de preparar as ervas, o número de indicações sendo 30% para uso externo e 70% para uso interno, e a forma mais comum, o chá. Além dos dados obtidos na feira, uma descrição botânica e um levantamento bibliográfico dos usos na medicina popular e em rituais afro-brasileiros são apresentados para cada espécie. Analisa-se o papel das plantas na saúde e na vida religiosa das pessoas do bairro, o conhecimento dos ervatários e a preocupante coleta das plantas da Mata Atlântica. (shrink)

Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous Huxley in 1956 proposing the term “psychedelic,” coined from two Greek words to mean “mind manifesting.” The scholars, one a psychiatrist and the other a celebrated novelist and philosopher, were exuberant about the potential of drugs for accessing the mind. Huxley favored a phrase from William Blake: -/- If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. -/- He postulated that psychedelics disturbed the “cerebral reducing valve” (1954), and (...) that this was in fact the shared mechanism for regular drug trips, as well as schizophrenic and mystical experiences. If it were the case, the drugs could offer a chemical shortcut to the divine, and a reasonable way to scientifically study mental illness. -/- With such ideas in vogue, the 1950s were heady years, at least for research on psychedelic drugs. More than 750 articles were published on LSD alone. Some studies made use of the drug experience to model schizophrenia, others to develop treatments for alcoholism. And as Nicolas Langlitz explains in Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain, the brain as filter – the idea of gates or doors (which, yes, also gave name to the band) – would go on to serve as a significant shared conceptual matrix for psychopharmacologic research, from experimental psychosis to experimental mysticism (10). (shrink)

We take this book forum as an opportunity to reflect on Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary through our experiences, exploring how these texts served as our tools, and to what end. We discuss a research methods seminar in which we traced one possible variation on the “genealogical line” and “pedagogical legacy” (p. 33) to which this reader is extended as an invitation. The spirit of that invitation is, in our understanding, not to a canon that (...) would replace any number of others, but to a set of equipment. (shrink)