What is the Anthropology of Policy?

An Introduction

Besteman, Catherine. 2010. “In and Out of the Academy: Policy and the Case for a Strategic
Anthropology.” Human Organization 69(4): 407–17.

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, eds. 1997. Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on
Governance and Power. London: Routledge.

Shore, Cris, Susan Wright, and David Però, eds. 2011. Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the
Analysis of Contemporary Power. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wedel, Janine R., and Gregory Feldman. 2005. “Why an Anthropology of Public Policy?”
Anthropological Quarterly 21(1): 1–2.

Wedel, Janine R., Cris Shore, Gregory Feldman, and Stacy Lathrop. 2005. “Toward an
Anthropology of Public Policy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 600 (July): 30–51.

Ethnography and Policy

Garsten, Christina. 2010. “Ethnography at the Interface: ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ as an
Anthropological Field of Enquiry.” In Ethnographic Practice in the Present, edited by Marit
Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell, and Helena Wulff, 56–68. Oxford: Berghahn.

Marshall, Catherine. 1984. “Elites, Bureaucrats, Ostriches, and Pussycats: Managing Research in
Policy Settings.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 15(3): 235–51.

Nader, Laura. 1974. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives from Studying Up.” In Reinventing
Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Vintage.

Riles, Annelise. 2001. The Network Inside Out. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Schwegler, Tara. 2008. “Trading Up: Reflections on ‘Trading Up: Reflections on Power,
Collaboration, and Ethnography in the Anthropology of Policy’.” Anthropology in Action:
Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 15(2): 10–25.

Schwegler, Tara, and Michael G. Powell. 2008. “Unruly Experts: Methods and Forms of
Collaboration in the Anthropology of Policy.” Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied
Anthropology in Policy and Practice 15(2): 1–9.
 Actors, Arenas, and Artifacts of Policy(making)

Audits and Indicators

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. 1999. “Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neo-Liberalism in
British Higher Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(4): 759–63.

Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics
and the Academy. London: Routledge.

Thedvall, Renita. 2012. “Negotiating Impartial Indicators: Putting Transparency into Practice in
the EU.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(2): 311–29.

Bureaucrats and Bureaucracy

Müller, Birgit, ed. 2013. The Gloss of Harmony: The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral
Organisations. London: Pluto.

Neumann, Iver B. 2012. At Home with the Diplomats: Inside a European Foreign Ministry.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Schia, Niels Nagelhus. 2013. “Being Part of the Parade — ‘Going Native’ in the United Nations
Security Council.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36(1): 138–56.

Thedvall, Renita. 2006. Eurocrats at Work: Negotiating Transparency in Postnational

Employment Policy. Stockholm: Department of Social Anthropology, University of
Stockholm.

Committees and Meetings

Bailey, Frederick George. 1965. “Decisions by Consensus in Councils and Committees: With
Specific Reference to Village and Local Government in India.” In Political Systems and the
Distribution of Power, edited by Michael Banton, 1–20. London: Tavistock.

Documents, Charts, Reports

Abram, Simone. 2003. “Anthropologies in Policies, Anthropologies in Places: Reflections on

Fieldwork ‘in’ Documents and Policies.” In Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology, edited
by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 138–57. London: Pluto.

Harper, Richard H. R. 1998. Inside the IMF: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology and
Organizational Action. Boston: Academic Press.
Hull, Matthew S. 2012. “Documents and Bureaucracy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:
251–67.

Hull, Matthew S. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban

Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Riles, Annelise, ed. 2006. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.

Stevens, Alex. 2011. “Telling Policy Stories: An Ethnographic Study of the Use of Evidence in
Policy-making in the UK.” Journal of Social Policy 40: 237–55.

Experts and Expertise

Boyer, Dominic. 2008. “Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts.” Anthropology in

Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice 15(2): 38–46.

Haenn, Nora, and David G. Cassagrande. 2007. “Citizens, Experts, and Anthropologists: Finding
Paths in Environmental Policy.” Human Organization 66(2): 99–102.

Marcus, George. 2008. “Collaborative Options and Pedagogical Experiment in Anthropological

Research on Experts and Policy Processes.” Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied
Anthropology in Policy and Practice 15(2): 47–57.

Moore, Sally F. 2001. “The International Production of Authoritative Knowledge: The Case of
Drought-Stricken West Africa.” Ethnography 2(2): 161–89.

Mosse, David. 2006. “Anti-Social Anthropology? Objectivity, Objection, and the Ethnography
of Public Policy and Professional Communities.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 12(4): 935–56.

Riles, Annelise. 2004. “Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge.”
American Ethnologist 31(3): 392–405.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. “Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures.” In Global Assemblages:
Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Stephen J. Collier
and Aihwa Ong, 464–81. Oxford: Blackwell.

The State

Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the
Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402.

Krohn-Hansen, Christian, and Knut G. Nustad, eds. 2005. State Formation: Anthropological
Perspectives. London: Pluto.

Visual Methods

Cremers, Anne Lia, René Garnets, and Martin Peter Grobusch. 2016. “Visual Ethnography:
Bridging Anthropology and Public Health.” Practicing Anthropology 38(4): 7–11.

Parkin, Stephen, and Ross Coomber. 2009. “Value in the Visual: On Public Injecting, Visual
Methods and Their Potential for Informing Policy (and Change).” Methodological
Innovations Online 4(2): 21–36.

Fieldsites

Aid and Economic Policy

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State
in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice
of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mosse, David. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice.
London: Pluto.

Mosse, David. 2005. “Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid.” In The Aid
Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development, edited by David Mosse and
David Lewis, 1–36. London: Pluto.

Mosse, David, and David Lewis, eds. 2005. The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in Global
Development. London: Pluto.

Wedel, Janine. 2001. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe, 2nd edition. New York: Palgrave.
 Education Policy

Bartlett, Lesley and Ofelia García. 2011. Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times: Dominican
Immigrant Youth in the Heights. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Brenneis, Don, Cris Shore, and Susan Wright. 2005. “Getting the Measure of Academia:
Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropology in Action 12(1): 1–10.

Koyama, Jill P. 2010. Making Failure Pay: For-Profit Tutoring, High-Stakes Testing, and Public
Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Environmental Policy

Barnes, Jessica, and Michael R. Dove, eds. 2015. Climate Cultures: Anthropological
Perspectives on Climate Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Carrier, James G., and Paige West, eds. 2009. Virtualism, Governance and Practice: Vision and
Execution in Environmental Conservation. Oxford: Berghahn.

Cassady J. 2010. “State Calculation of Cultural Survival in Environmental Risk Assessment:

Consequences for Alaska Natives.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(4): 451–71

Checker, Melissa. 2007. “‘But I Know It’s True’: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice, and
Anthropology.” Human Organization 66(2): 112–24.

Cirone, P. 2005. “The Integration of Tribal Traditional Lifeways into EPA’s Decision Making.”
Practicing Anthropology 27(1): 20–4.

Comito, Jacqueline, Jon Wolseth, and Lois Wright Morton. 2013. “The State’s Role in Water
Quality: Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioners and the Agricultural Status
Quo.” Human Organization 72(1): 44–54.

Shoreman, Eleanor E., and Nora Haenn. 2009. “Regulation, Conservation, and Collaboration:
Ecological Anthropology in the Mississippi Delta.” Human Ecology 37: 95–107.

Shoreman, Eleanor-Ouimet. 2010. “Concessions and Conservation: A Study of

Environmentalism and Anti-Environmentalism among Commodity Farmers.” Environmental
Anthropology 14(1): 52–66.

Townsend, Patricia K. 2009. Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policies, 2nd ed. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland.
Treitler, Inga, and Douglas Midgett. 2007. “It’s about Water: Anthropological Perspectives on
Water and Policy.” Human Organization 66(2): 140–49.

West, Paige. 2006. Conservation Is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New
Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Whiteford, Linda. 2005. “Casualties in the Globalization of Water: A Moral Economy of Health
Perspective.” In Globalization, Water, & Health: Resource Management in Time of Scarcity,
edited by Linda Whiteford and Scott Whiteford, 25–44. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.

Health Policy

Banerjee, Dwaipayan. 2017. “Markets and Molecules: A Pharmaceutical Primer from the South”
Medical Anthropology 36: 363–80

Browner, Carole H., and Carolyn Sargent, eds. 2011 Reproduction, Globalization, and the State:
New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Castañeda, Heide. 2019. Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status

Immigrant Families. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

De Leon, Jason, and Michael Wells. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the
Migrant Trail. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De Zordo, Silvia, Joanna Mishtal, and Lorena Anton, eds. 2016. A Fragmented Landscape:
Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe. Oxford: Berghahn.

Erikson, Susan L. 2012. “Global Health Business: The Production and Performativity of
Statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany.” Medical Anthropology 32(4): 367–84.

Farmer, Paul. 2001. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Farmer, Paul. 2004. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the
Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Farmer, Paul, Arthur Kleinman, Jim Kim, and Matthew Basilico, eds. 2013. Reimagining Global
Health. Berkeley: University of California Press

Fong, Vanessa. 2002. “China's One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters.”
American Anthropologist 104(4): 1098–109.

Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp, eds. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global
Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstein, Donna. 2007. “Life or Profit?: Structural Violence, Moral Psychology, and
Pharmaceutical Politics.” Anthropology in Action 14(3): 44–58.

Holmes, Seth, and Heide Castañeda. 2016. “Representing the European Refugee Crisis in
Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death.” American
Ethnologist 43(1): 12–24.

Kaufman, Sharon. 2015. Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and
Where to Draw the Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Keshavjee, Salmaan. 2014. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Kowal, Emma. 2010. “Is Culture the Problem or the Solution?: Outstation Health and the Politics
of Remoteness” In Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, edited
by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson, 179–94. Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press.

Lea, Tess. 2008. Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia.
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

Lock, Margaret. 2001. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Lock, Margaret. 2014. The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Minkler, Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein. 2008. Community-based Participatory Research for
Health: from Process to Outcomes, 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mishtal, Joanna. 2014. “Reproductive Governance in the New Europe: Competing Visions of
Morality, Sovereignty, and Supranational Policy.” Anthropological Journal of European
Cultures 23(1): 59–76.

Mishtal, Joanna. 2015. The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State and Reproductive Rights
in Postsocialist Poland. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Morgan, L., and E. Roberts. 2012. Reproductive governance in Latin America. Anthropology &
Medicine 19(2): 241–54.

Mulligan, Jessica, and Heide Castañeda, eds. 2017. Unequal Coverage: The Experience of
Health Care Reform in the United States. New York: New York University Press.
Ostrach, B, and M. Singer. 2012. “Syndemics of War: Malnutrition-Infectious Disease
Interactions, and the Unintended Health Consequences of Intentional War Policies.” Annals
of Anthropological Practice 36(2): 257–73.

Rivkin-Fish, M. 2005. Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rivkin-Fish, Michele. 2011. “Learning the Moral Economy of Commodified Health Care:
Community Education, Failed Consumers, and the Making of Ethical Clinician-Citizens.”
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 35(2): 183–208.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2008. “Illegal Organ Trade: Global Justice and the Traffic in Human
Organs.” In Living Donor Organ Transplantation, edited by Rainer W. G. Gruessner and
Enrico Benedetti, 106–21. New York: McGraw-Hill Medical.

Singer, Merrill. 2014. “Transcending ‘Ordinary Times Rules’ in Environmental Health: The
Critical Challenge for Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology 33(5): 367–72.

Singer, Merrill, Nicola Bulled, and Bayla Ostrach. 2013. “Syndemics and Human Health:
Implications for Prevention and Intervention.” Annals of Applied Anthropology 36(2): 205–
10

Smyth-Oka, Vania. 2013. “Managing Labor and Delivery among Impoverished Populations in
Mexico: Cervical Examinations as Bureaucratic Practice.” American Anthropologist 115(4):
595–607.

Sufrin, Carolyn. 2017 Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in
France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Willen, Sarah S., Jessica Mulligan, and Heide Castañeda. 2011 “Take A Stand Commentary:
How Can Medical Anthropologists Contribute to Contemporary Conversations on "Illegal"
Im/migration and Health?” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(3): 331–56.

Indigenous Policy-Governance-Knowledge Relations

Absolon, Kathleen E. 2011. Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know. Halifax, Nova Scotia:
Fernwood Publishers.

Adelson, Naomi. 2000. ‘Being Alive Well': Health and the Politics of Cree Well-being. Toronto,
Ontario: University of Toronto Press.
Berkes, Fikret. 2012. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource
Management, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

Coursen, David F. 1993. “Tribes as States: Indian Tribal Authority to Regulate and Enforce
Federal Environmental Laws and Regulations.” Environmental Law Reporter 23 ELR 10579.

Deloria, Philip J., K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Mark N. Trahant,
Loren Frank Ghiglione, Douglas L. Medin, and Ned Blackhawk. 2018. “Unfolding Futures:
Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century.” Daedalus 147(2):6–16.

Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline,
and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Gagnon Valoree S. 2016. “Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwa’s Great Sea”): An Intersecting History of
Treaty Rights, Tribal Fish Harvesting, and Toxic Risk in Keweenaw Bay, United States.”
Water History 8(4):365–84.

Geniusz, Wendy Djinn. 2009. Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical
Anishinaabe Teachings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of
Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

Marchand, Michael E., Kristiina A. Vogt, Rodney Cawston, John D. Tovey, John McCoy, Nancy
Maryboy, Calvin T. Mukumoto, and Daniel J. Vogt, eds. 2020. The Medicine Wheel:
Environmental Decision-making Process of Indigenous Peoples. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press.

Nadasdy, Paul. 2004. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State
Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Norman, Emma S. 2014. Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States and
Indigenous Communities. New York: Routledge.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simpson, Leanne B. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical
Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Todd, Zoe. 2018. “Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous
Legal Orders and Colonialism in North/Western Canada.” DIES: Decolonization,
Indigeneity, Education, and Society 7(1): 60–75.

Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2018. “What do Indigenous Knowledges Do for Indigenous Peoples?” In
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices of Environmental
Sustainability, edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling, 57–82. Cambridge University
Press.

Language Policy

Anderson, Kimberly. 2009. War or Common Cause? A Critical Ethnography of Language

Education Policy, Race, and Cultural Citizenship. Charlotte, NC: Information Age
Publishing.

Blommaert, Jan. 2009. “Ethnography and Democracy: Hymes’s Political Theory of Language.”
Text & Talk 29(3): 257–76.

Canagarajah, Suresh. 2006. “Ethnographic Methods in Language Policy.” In An Introduction to

Language Policy: Theory and Method, edited by T. Ricento, 153–69. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.

Cassels Johnson, David. 2013. Language Policy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cassels Johnson, David. 2009. “Ethnography of Language Policy.” Language Policy 8(2): 139–
59.

Hult, Francis M., and David Cassels Johnson, eds. 2017. Research Methods in Language Policy
and Planning: A Practical Guide. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Davis, Kathryn A., and Prem Phyak. 2017. Engaged Language Policy and Practices. New York,
Routledge.

Hornberger, Nancy H., Aldo Anzures Tapia, David H. Hanks, Frances Kvietok Dueñas. 2018.
“Ethnography of Language Planning and Policy.” Language Teaching 51(2): 152–86.

McCarty, Teresa, ed. 2010. Ethnography and Language Policy. New York: Routledge.

McCarty, Teresa. 2015. “How the Logic of Gap Discourse Perpetuates Education Inequality: A
View from the Ethnography of Language Policy.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25(1):
70–72.

McCarty, Teresa, James Collins, and Rodney Hopson. 2011. “Dell Hymes and the New
Language Policy Studies.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 8(5): 279–90.
McCarty, Teresa, and Lu Liu. “Ethnography of Language Policy.” In Research Methods in
Language and Education, edited by Kendall A. King, Yi-Ju Lai, and Stephen May, 53–66.
New York: Springer.

Public & Social Policy

Bellier, Irène. 1997. “The Commission as an Actor: An Anthropologist's View.” In Participation

and Policy-Making in the European Union, edited by H. Wallace and A. R. Young, 91–115.
Oxford: Clarendon.

Bellier, Irène. 2000. “The European Union, Identity Politics and the Logic of Interests'
Representation.” In An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining and
Experiencing the New Europe, edited by Irène Bellier and Thomas M. Wilson, 53–73.
Oxford: Berg.

Dewey, Susan, and Patty Kelly, eds. 2011. Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy, and the State in
Global Perspective. New York: New York University Press.

Feldman, Gregory. 2011. The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor and Policymaking in the
European Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Greenhalgh, Susan. 2008. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Greenhalgh, Susan, and Edwin A. Winckler. 2005. Governing China’s Population: From
Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.

High, Holly. 2014. Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos. Singapore: National University
of Singapore Press.

Mackey, E. 2002. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada.
Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

McDonald, Maryon. 2005. “EU Policy and Destiny: A Challenge for Anthropology.”
Anthropology Today 21(1): 3–4.
Michaud, Jean. 2009. “Handling Mountain Minorities in China, Vietnam and Laos: From History
to Current Concerns.” Asian Ethnicity 10(1): 25–49.

Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London:
Routledge.

Weitzer, Ronald. 2010. “Sex Work: Paradigms and Policies.” In Sex for Sale: Prostitution,
Pornography, and the Sex Industry, 2nd ed, edited by Ronald John Weitzer, 1–54. New
York: Routledge.

Anthropologists and Policymakers

Peters, Rebecca Warne. 2015. “Anthropology's Contributions to Training in the Policy

Professions: An Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP).” Roundtable, Chicago,
November 2013. Contributions by Keith Brown, Maia Green, Susan Hyatt, Robert
Rubinstein, and Ronald Stade. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 38(2):
356–64.

Last updated: July 2022