Overview
From biometrics to predictive policing, contemporary security relies on sophisticated scientific evidence-gathering and knowledge-making focused on the human body. Bringing together new anthropological perspectives on the complexities of security in the present moment, the contributors to Bodies as Evidence reveal how bodies have become critical sources of evidence that is organized and deployed to classify, recognize, and manage human life. Through global case studies that explore biometric identification, border control, forensics, predictive policing, and counterterrorism, the contributors show how security discourses and practices that target the body contribute to new configurations of knowledge and power. At the same time, margins of error, unreliable technologies, and a growing suspicion of scientific evidence in a ""post-truth"" era contribute to growing insecurity, especially among marginalized populations. Contributors. Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, Gregory Feldman, Francisco J. Ferrandiz, Daniel M. Goldstein, Ieva Jusionyte, Amade M'charek, Mark Maguire, Joseph P. Masco, Ursula Rao, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Joseba Zulaika, Nils Zurawski
Full Product Details
Author: Mark Maguire ,
Ursula Rao ,
Nils Zurawski
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.363kg
ISBN: 9781478002949
ISBN 10: 1478002948
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 30 November 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
This book gives new meaning to the anthropology of security. A scintillating, tightly-knit collection, it illuminates, quite brilliantly, the core drama of our times, when radical uncertainty feeds a fetishism of evidence, when alt-authoritarianism breeds a strange new relativism and an insidious obsession with fakery. Those who live in these times seek variously to counter its terrors by perfecting their fix on truth and its elusive measures; above all they return, as modernity's children, to the ground-zero of the human body, thus to anchor the indices of the real and the absolute. --Jean Comaroff, coauthor of The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order
The volume certainly highlights what a conceptual anthropological engagement with 'security,' as well as with 'evidence' means. The volume will be worth reading for scholars in- and out-side anthropology interested in the production of knowledge, technologies, security and governmentality. -- Monika Weissensteiner * Surveillance Studies *
Author Information
Mark Maguire is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Maynooth University. Ursula Rao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. Nils Zurawski is Senior Researcher and Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg. Maguire and Zurawski are coeditors of The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counterterrorism, and Border Control. Rao is author of News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions.
