Engaging Foucault ethnographically Jonathan Xavier Inda ed., Anthropologies of modernity: Foucault, governmentality, and life politics. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 288, ISBN 0631228276 (paperback). This edited book sets out to bridge the gap between ethnography and Foucault’s ideas on governmentality. In a clear introduction Inda puts forward Foucault’s analysis of changes in systems of rule from Machiavellian notions of sovereignty to the rise of the sixteenth century ‘arts of government’ in which government was coined as ‘the conduct of conduct’—“the more or less considered and calculated ways of thinking and acting that propose to shape, regulate, or manage the conduct of individuals or groups toward specific goals or ends” (p.6). Governmentality, Foucault’s neologism for ‘the arts of government’, is about investigating the conditions of life of the population of a state— ‘biopolitics’— and of the individual human body—‘anatomopolitics’ or ‘discipline’. The book has an anthropological focus as it does not limit the examination of modern government to ‘Western’ state settings, but widens its scope to ‘non-Western’ locations and forms of global governance, taking into account new technologies that focus on knowledge and life, and necropolitics. The book is organized in five parts. In the first, ‘colonial reasons’, David Scott and Robert Redfield analyze governmentality under colonial rule. Scott deals with the manifestations of government during the colonial history of Sri Lanka. He argues that criticizing “European hegemony in the construction of knowledges about the non-European world … ought not to be confused … with programmatically ignoring Europe” (p.24). An understanding of political rationalities of colonial power needs a “critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which the varied forms of its insertion into the lives of the colonized were constructed and organized” (p.25). This historiographic case presents the displacement of the political rationality of sovereignty by that of governmentality in Sri Lanka. The first rationality was embodied in taxation, i.e., the sheer extraction of wealth. The second, creating an economy and a rational public, aimed at the body and its conditions of life, obliging “a progressive desire for industry, regularity, and individual accomplishment” (p.41). Unfortunately, this chapter makes difficult reading due to long sentences with many sub clauses. Redfield, in an appealing historiographic account, compares the Panopticon of Discipline and punish with a French-Guyanan penal colony. Elaborating on their differences, he wavers between Foucault’s metaphorical use of the Panopticon for explaining disciplinary power on the one hand and its concrete tangible setting—as invented by Jeremy Bentham—on the other. In my view, this mystifies the argument: is this a plea for replacing the metaphor of the Panopticon by that of the penal colony when analyzing modernity in the non-European world, or is it about showing the alternate—and “imperfect” (p.65)—manifestation of modernity in the penal colony? The second part of the book deals with global governance. Aihwa Ong coins the concept of ‘graduated sovereignty’ (p.85), referring to global corporations that take an active part in government and achieve legal compromises regarding national sovereignty in special economic zones, creating citizens that are “subjected to different sets of civil, political, and economic rights” (p.94). Next, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta engage in an instructive attempt to add a spatial dimension to the debate on the imagination of the state. They argue that “states represent themselves as reified entities with particular spatial properties” (p.105) and relate this to the question of globalization. Based on an ethnography of a governmental program in India, they show how two state metaphors produce a spatial and a scalar image of the state. ‘Verticality’ refers to the state ‘sitting’ at the top. ‘Encompassment’ refers to the state encompassing its localities, regions, and communities. The authors widen the notion of governmentality up to a global scale and conceptualize the—decentered—state as “bundles of social practices” (p.118). Regarding experiences with transnational governmentality in several African countries, they criticize views that call for democratization while exposing policies made and imposed by “wholly unelected and unaccountable” international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank (p.119). Together with the presence of non-state but ‘statelike’ actors like NGOs this calls for an “ethnography of encompassment”, focusing on processes through which governmentality is reproduced by both state and non-state actors “emphasizing the similarities of technologies of government across domains” (p.123). In ‘technico sciences’, the third division of the book, David Horn and Adriana Petryna deal with the relation between government and science. Horn contributes an enjoyable historiography on the late nineteenth century invention of the criminal anthropologist: “a new kind of scientific expert, qualified to read the deviant body and to diagnose social dangers” (p.135). He complements Foucault on the invention of ‘the criminal’ and focuses on the performance of criminal anthropology at a time that “forensic experts proposed to know and manage [crime] through detailed knowledge of social laws and exegesis of the criminal body” (p.136). Criminal anthropology found its necessary legitimation as an authority on one side in the coincidence of its views with “popular culture and proverbial wisdom” (p.138) as it “sought to create a new kind of scientific ‘common sense’” (p.144). On the other hand it needed to elevate itself “above the level of popular wisdom” (ibid.) through its performative qualities, embodied in instruments, measurements, numbers and also the scientist’s access to asylums, prisons, schools, and orphanages to perform tests. Unfortunately the chapter lacks a conclusion. Petryna provides a cogent and inspiring study on ‘biological citizenship’ in Chernobyl, Ukraine, based on historical and ethnographic work. She studies how science served as a political technique, creating truths and notions of citizenship in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The Soviet regime underestimated the extent of the disaster in terms of victims and radiation rates. After the regime fell, the new state of Ukraine re-appraised the extent of the disaster on the basis of new scientific research and gave victims the right to health care. The Ukrainian citizen was basically unprotected, but could get “some measure of protection against the vagaries of joblessness and social disorientation” by making a claim to ‘illness’ (p.167). In order to avoid abandonment people maintained a tie with the state—converting themselves into ‘biological citizens’ (p.172). The fourth part contains two contributions on ‘biosocial subjects’ dealing with the field of gene technology. First, Paul Rabinow builds forth on biopower and coins the term ‘biosociality’ (p.186), arguing that because of technological development the split between nature and culture will be overcome. Next, Karen-Sue Taussig, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath coin the term ‘flexible eugenics’ in which “long-standing biases against atypical bodies meet both the perils and the possibilities that spring from genetic technologies” (p.196). They present an ethnography on ‘dwarfs’ who are members of the Little People of America, an organization for people of short stature. Confronted with evolving genetic science and the discourse on the engineering of the body in search of individual perfectibility, these dwarfs currently face new possibilities and risks. Possibilities to change their bodies and ‘control’ their reproduction dovetail with a growing societal rejection of the deviant. Regarding the latter, they resist current scientific options by a counter-discourse of valuating dwarf bodies and their right of reproduction. On a more abstract level the enhanced freedom of choice becomes a tyranny in which people are “obliged to be free” (p.201). The last part of the book, on ‘necropolitical projects’, is in my view the best. In a frenetic style Diane M. Nelson collates cartoons, ethnography, Lamarckian biology, social activism, and popular terminology in order to understand Foucault’s concept of power in a practical way, meanwhile struggling with her own ethical stance. Drawing on ethnographies on the Guatemalan war and its aftermath, and the country’s malaria eradication program, she seeks to ‘know’—savoir— the repressive or emancipatory character of biopolitics. Throughout the text she shows that both cases are concerned with the deployment of modern rationalities aiming at the protection of the life of the social body. On the level of the individual, she argues that “the productivity of power, the very subjectivization that works through these relational networks suggests [that] we are not actors in the neoliberal autonomous sense, but neither are we docile automatons” (p.234). The ultimate challenge in taking up Foucault’s power theory—contrasting the social activist search for equity and improvement—is in thinking about “that without which I cannot think at all” (p.235). Finally João Biehl deals with the politics of death.His sophisticated theoretical outline results in Foucault’s (1980: 143) argument that “modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question” (p.249). Biehl (ibid.) relates current sovereignty—that consists of “making live and letting die” (Foucault 1992: 172)—to the problem of AIDS control in Brazil. Although the Brazilian way of tackling AIDS is hailed as a success worldwide, a certain proportion of the diseased population is not reached. “From the perspective of the marginal and poor people with AIDS living in the streets and in and out of pastoral institutions,we see that economic globalization, state and medical reform, and the acceleration of claims over human right and citizenship coincide with a continuous local production of social death that remains by and large unaccounted for” (p.250). Biehl focuses on how populations are medically and bureaucratically restructured around life-extending treatments or simply excluded from them. He mentions ‘technologies of invisibility’ turning people into ‘absent things’ (p.259). He equals the ‘invisible’ groups suffering from AIDS to Agamben’s concept of homo sacer as these are “included in the social order through their dying” since their dying benefits the population as a whole (p.263). These people are “traced as ‘drug addicts’, ‘robbers’, and ‘prostitutes’, labels which allow them to be socially blamed for their dying” (p.263).Biopolitics shows its morbid side where “letting die is a technical and political action” (p.262) and the essential questions of current modernity are “Who shall live? Who shall die? And at what cost?” (p.264). Concluding, this book makes for instructive reading on “concrete manifestations of modern government” (p.11) in different localities and on different levels. However, it does not completely live up to its subtitle, as only Ferguson and Gupta, Petryna, Taussig, Rapp and Heath, Nelson, and Biehl take up the challenge to extend Foucault’s thought into ethnography. Rabinow and Ong relate to Foucault, but present little to respectively no ethnographic material, whereas Scott, Redfield, and Horn provide historiographic accounts. Some authors—instead of providing their personal experiences on reading Foucault—could have made a bigger effort to relate concepts as governmentality and biopolitics to ethnographical analysis. Furthermore, Rabinow’s contribution—thoughtprovoking as it was when first published in 1999—lost much of its impact regarding the quickly evolving field of gene technology and its more philosophical consequences. Redfield, Nelson and Biehl refer to the work of Giorgio Agamben. In my view, other contributions missed the chance to engage with the latter’s theory on the relationship between biopolitics, citizenship and sovereignty. Petryna’s argument on the role of biology in shaping the debate on citizenship dovetails, as I see it, with Agamben’s thesis that modern citizenship is predicated on the politicization of bare life. Her description of “the basic biological existence of populations that precedes political life” (p.173) touches upon Agamben’s discussion of the ancient figure of homo sacer as man “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Agamben 1998: 8). In this line of thought Taussig et al. could have turned to Agamben’s thesis that biopolitics resides in the sovereign’s right to determine who who is worth living and who not—with genetics as instrument of rule—so as to analyse mechanisms of exclusion that distinguish between the citizen and its antithesis: homo sacer (Agamben 1998). Martijn Koster Wageningen University References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press