As the rational choice model of “policy” proliferates in “policy studies, ” the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of “policy” as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists’ empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of “state” and “private, ”“local” or “national” and “global, ”“macro” and “micro, ”“top down” and “bottom up, ” and “centralized” and “decentralized” not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.
ArticleIf ethnography is more than participantobservation, then relations are more than connections: The case for nonlocal ethnography in a world of apparatuses Abstract Efforts to theorize globalization remain limited by an ethnographic data set obtained primarily through direct sensory experience. This article argues that such empiricism persists because the difference between connections and relations as methodological constructs remains blurred. Their conflation precludes a fuller view of how apparatuses organize global processes. Apparatuses decompose direct social connections and replace them with shifting constellations of indirect social relations. Unlike connections, relations are mediated by abstract third agents and have an arbitrary relationship in/to space and time. This weakens participant-observation's ability to capture an apparatus's operations. As a remedy, the article suggests 'nonlocal' ethnography, which examines how disconnected actors utilize an apparatus's mediating agents -e.g. statistical calculations, probabilities estimates, high-scale moral narratives, and interpretative paradigmsto channel the global circulation of migrants. The argument for the apparatus's theoretical value and nonlocal ethnography's methodological value is illustrated through an illegal migration journey from Senegal to Italy.
A three-dimensional tracking system was used to examine whether subjects with Parkinson's disease (PD) would show characteristic performance deficits in an unconstrained pointing task. Five targets were presented in a pyramidal array in space to 11 individuals with mild to moderate PD and 8 age-matched controls. After the target was indicated, subjects closed their eyes and pointed to the remembered target locations without vision. Despite the absence of visual feedback during movement, PD subjects were as accurate overall as controls. However, PD subjects showed greater variable errors, more irregular trajectories, and a vertical endpoint bias in which their endpoints were significantly lower than controls. They also showed deficiencies in the compensatory organization of joint rotations to ensure consistency in azimuthal (horizontal) positioning of the arm endpoint. We concluded that, under appropriate task conditions, PD subjects may not show overall deficits in accuracy even when making targeted movements at normal speed without visual feedback. Nevertheless, our findings indicate that there are certain dimensions of performance which are selectively altered in Parkinson's disease even when overall performance is normal.
In this article, I examine how a territorial imaginary conflating culture, territory, nation, and security allows “elites of statecraft” in Europe to frame citizenship and integration policy as (inter)national security matters. Focusing on post‐Soviet Estonia, I argue that this imaginary legitimized the denial of citizenship to Soviet‐era Russian speakers and enabled the government's integration policy objective of creating the “Estonian cultural domain.” Drawing on historical, archival, and ethnographic research, I demonstrate how the invocation of national security justified these events and how the territorial imaginary structured the making of integration policy from the 1991 reestablishment of independence to E.U. accession in 2004.
Political action is frequently conceptualised as starting from the ground up. Plausible as this point may be, it pays insufficient attention to well-established arguments that we inhabit administrative society, implicitly contrasted against political society, with technocrats operating the requisite power/knowledge grid away from the street. Like Foucault's 'specific intellectuals', technocrats work in pivotal positions in apparatuses of population regulation, but nevertheless can potentially recognise the plight of the marginalised 'masses' as they themselves are also alienated subject-objects of population regulation. This article draws on a range of ethnographic encounters with technocrats working in diverse areas of migration management in the European Union to prompt an examination of the historical and social conditions that impede, and often render unthinkable, direct engagement between technocrats and the migrants whom they are paid to regulate. The article draws explicitly on Hannah Arendt's work on the vita activa, compassion, thinking, judging and revolution (1) to explain how the apparatus's systemic isolation of both its policy experts and policy targets impedes political action and (2) to identify a form of ethnographic engagement that might help to overcome it.
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