Didier Fassin Research Articles

Framing Local Attitudes to a Modern Health Intervention in the Neoliberal Order – Culturalism and Malaria Control in Southeastern Nigeria

Interventionists usually blame cultural factors and traditional attitudes for non-compliance of target populations, a framework Didier Fassin terms as culturalism. Despite their efforts, what the Roll Back Malaria employees find in southeastern Nigeria is a ‘troubling’ nonchalance towards the programme because target populations’ perceptions of malaria differ from the donor/programme perspective. The RBM employees cast the local attitude as culturalism, accordingly framing their exhortations in terms of this discourse. How the Roll Back Malaria employees deployed culturalism to fit with the neoliberal individualizing framework of current international health practices is one more nuanced analytical perspective the article brings to intervention literature.

BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

ABSTRACTA new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.

Beyond Persecutory Impulse and Humanising Trace: On Didier Fassin’s The Will to Punish

This essay argues that Didier Fassin’s ‘The Will to Punish’ (2018) reveals the social grounds for a ‘persecutory impulse’ in modern punishment, which sits alongside a ‘humanising trace’. The challenge for a critical theory of modern penality is to think through this strange combination. The work of Melanie Klein and Freud, properly interpreted, can illuminate its conjunction and disjunction.

Book Review: Didier Fassin (ed.), Writing the World of Policing

Book Review: Didier Fassin (ed.), <i>Writing the World of Policing</i>

Corrigendum – 2018 – American Anthropologist

American AnthropologistVolume 120, Issue 4 p. 879-879 ERRATUMFree Access Corrigendum – 2018 – American Anthropologist This article corrects the following: The (Mis)Fortunes and Prospects of Medical Anthropology in Nigeria Chidi Ugwu, Volume 120Issue 3American Anthropologist pages: 573-576 First Published online: August 21, 2018 First published: 15 November 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13165Citations: 1AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL This is a revision of what originally appeared in published form (Ugwu 2018). The author apologizes for this error. The following errors were published. 1 On page 575, a passage was written as follows: Ugwu: “Didier Fassin (2001) names this tendency to attribute health attitudes to cultural practices ‘culturalism.’ ‘Culture’ is framed in this light as those ways of thinking and doing that belong to tradition and in the past and, therefore, undermine modernist progress. Culture becomes a black box—sort of an ill-defined scapegoat for ‘what's wrong’ with a target population and why they won't just comply with a modern intervention. By overdetermining the role of cultural factors, this discourse is politically convenient for governments, politicians, and institutions because it relieves them of responsibility while simultaneously locating responsibility on a clear target—the local people (Durham 2016, 3). The passage should have read: Didier Fassin (2001; cited in Durham 2016, 3) names this tendency to attribute health attitudes to cultural practices “culturalism.” Culturalism, Elizabeth Durham quotes Didier Fassin (2001, 306) as explaining, is the supposition that “the pertinent explanation [of an issue] can be found among those who are the object of the action, not those who instigate it … by overdetermining the role of cultural factors, it sweeps aside any socioeconomic or sociopolitical explanations of the phenomena examined.” Durham cites Behague's (2014) interesting argument that the “tendency to attribute health problems to cultural practices is politically convenient as it relieves governments, institutions, and politicians of their responsibilities, while it also identifies a clear target … the local population.” 2 The following reference should be added: Behague, Dominque. 2014. “Thoughts on Ebola.” Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University, December 13. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/mhs/2014/12/thoughts-on-ebola/. REFERENCE CITED Ugwu, Chidi. 2018. “The Mis(Fortunes) and Prospects of Medical Anthropology in Nigeria.” American Anthropologist 120 (3): 573– 76. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13092. Citing Literature Volume120, Issue4December 2018Pages 879-879 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACTA recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.

Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition by Didier Fassin

Reviewed by: Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition by Didier Fassin Kristen Drybread Didier Fassin, Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2017. 382 pp. In the 18th century, the prison emerged as both the paradigmatic form of modern punishment and a philosophical model for thinking through tensions between freedom and control in the formation of liberal democratic subjects. Since then, prisons have been a critical site for studying power, subjection, and the state. While the bulk of academic investigations of punishment have grounded their theories upon either philosophical models of the imprisonment or sensationalistic representations of captive life, since the mid-20th century field studies of carceral institutions have played an important role in advancing the scientific and critical study of imprisonment as a technique of social control and "a medium of racialized statecraft" (Gordon 2008:652). Didier Fassin's Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition constitutes a valuable contribution to this line of research. On the one hand, the book provides scholars of imprisonment with a detailed look into the contemporary French penal system. On the other hand, the manuscript offers readers who are new to prison studies a solid introduction to the field. Research for the book was based on the seven months of fieldwork Fassin conducted in one short-stay facility in a disadvantaged urban region of France over the course of four years. With enormous tact and without gratuitousness, the ethnographer chronicles the everyday indignities prisoners suffer in confinement. But the book's analysis is not limited to the internal space of the prison: Fassin follows what he calls "the penal chain," from the formation of public opinion about crime, to legislative efforts that selectively combat its spread, to police policies that target specific populations for arrest, to courts that confer particularly harsh sentences on persons who are economically and racially marginalized (26–28, [End Page 447] 71). In so doing, he calls attention to the social differentiation that leads to the law's selective, and repressive, focus on illegal acts committed by poor people of color. Following directly on the heels of Enforcing Order, Fassin's (2013) study of repressive policing in France, Prison Worlds reinforces and extends the anthropologist's prior critique of the ways punishments are unequally distributed along racial, social, and geographic lines in contemporary liberal democracies. The central question the book arguably asks is: how "does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results?" (Alexander 2012:103). Fassin argues that answering this question is particularly fraught in France, where the issue of race in prison is never directly confronted: "The prison management does not want to know about it, and the staff prefer not to speak of it" (59). To shatter the nation's silence about the overrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities in its prisons, Fassin conducted an original census of the short-stay facility in which he carried out his ethnographic research; the project is presented in Chapter 2. Using the variables of age, nationality, and race/ethnicity, he found that black and Arab men under the age of 30 made up half of the prison population. What is more, when men over 30 are added to the count, two-thirds of prisoners were ethnic minorities. Fassin notes that these results will likely surprise people who assume that the French republican ideal of equality among citizens means that all receive equal treatment under the law. He further argues that this surprise points to the fact that the overrepresentation of minorities in prison has become naturalized—in France and in many other parts of the world where the "war on drugs" has encouraged the criminalization of poor and dark-skinned men (and, increasingly, women) who have committed minor legal offenses. Echoing, but never directly citing, black feminist scholars who have been studying the worldwide expansion of mass incarceration for decades (Alexander 2012, Davis 2003, Gilmore 2007), Fassin notes that the naturalization of imprisonment as a strategy of social control has accompanied the decline of the social state. In Chapter 1, Fassin argues that at the same time that liberal democratic governments have abdicated their responsibility for...

Introduction: Trauma and its Histories in Australia

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 Mark S. Micale, “Toward a Global History of Trauma”, in Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War, edited by Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 2 Ibid., 289. 3 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, translated by Rachel Gomme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 284. 4 For a useful overview see Michael Robertson, Edwina Light, Wendy Lipworth, and Garry Walter, “The Contemporary Significance of the Holocaust for Australian Psychiatry”, Health and History 18, no. 2 (2016): 109–111. 5 Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 89–107. 6 Fassin and Rechtmann, 94–5. 7 Young, 111. 8 See for example Bruce Boman, “The Vietnam Veteran Ten Years On”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 16 , no.3 (1982): 107–27; Wayne Hall and Donald McPhee, “Do Vietnam Veterans Suffer from Toxic Neurasthenia?”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 19, no. 1 (1985): 19–29; Jan Westerink and Leah Giarratano, “The Impact of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder on Partners and Children of Australian Vietnam Veterans”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 33, no. 6 (1999): 841–7. 9 See Beverley Raphael, “Editorial Comment: Psychiatric Consultancy in Major Disaster”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 18 (1984): 303–06; Beverley Raphael , “Psychosocial Aspects of Disaster: Some Australian Studies, and the Ash Wednesday Bushfires”, Medical Journal of Australia, 141, no. 5 (1984): 268–9. See also Alexander C. McFarlane, “The Ash Wednesday Bushfires in South Australia: Implications for Planning for Future Post-Disaster Services” The Medical Journal of Australia 141(5) (1984): 286–291 and Paul Valent, “The Ash Wednesday bushfires in Victoria”, Medical Journal of Australia 141, no. 5 (1984) : 291–9. The conclusions drawn from these experiences were applied in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Black Saturday bush fires. See Garry J. Stevens, Julie C. Dunsmore , Kingsley E. Agho, Melanie R. Taylor, Alison L. Jones, and Beverley Raphael, “Coping Support Factors among Australians Affected by Terrorism: 2002 Bali Bombings Survivors Speak”, Medical Journal of Australia 199, no. 11 (2013): 772–5; and Richard A. Byrant, Elizabeth Waters, Lisa Gibbs, et al., “Psychological Outcomes Following the Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 48, no. 7 (2014): 634–43. 10 Bruce S. Singh, “The Long-term Psychological Consequences of Disaster”, Medical Journal of Australia 145 (1986): 555–6. 11 On World War II veterans see Malcolm A. Kidson, John C. Douglas, and Brendan J. Holwill, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Australian World War II Veterans Attending a Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic”, Medical Journal of Australia 158, no. 8 (1993): 563–6. For examples of renewed medical attention to POWs see D.C. Hinden, “Prisoners of War: Long-term Effects”, Medical Journal of Australia 11, no. 1 (1981): 565–6; Ian L. Duncan, “Life in a Japanese Prisoner -of-War Camp”, Medical Journal of Australia 7, no. 1 (1982): 302–06; Kerry L. Goulston, Owen F. Dent, Pierre H. Chapuis, et al., “Gastrointestinal Morbidity among World War II Pris- 9 oners of War: 40 Years on”, Medical Journal of Australia 143, no. 1 (1985): 6–10; Christopher Tennant, Kerry Goulston, and Owen Dent, “Australian Prisoners of War of the Japanese: Postwar Psychiatric Hospitalisation and Psychological Morbidity”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 20, no. 3 (1986): 334–40; Ian P. Burges Watson, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Australian Prisoners of the Japanese: A Clinical Study”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27, no. 1 (1993): 20–9. 12 Christina Twomey, The Battle Within: POWs in postwar Australia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018), 213–40; Christina Twomey, “Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac”, History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 85–108. 13 See Elizabeth D. Paratz and Benny Katz, “Ageing Holocaust Survivors in Australia”, Medical Journal of Austrlaia 194, no. 4 (2011): 194–7; Paul Valent, “Holocaust Traumatology in Australia ”, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 16, no. 3 (2010): 95–111. Valent argues that this may be because ‘Australian Jewry...

Between Humanitarian and Political Realism: Anthropological Perspective on the Refugee Crisis in Germany

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The article historicizes the German ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 in the context of post-World War II politics of migration and asylum in the country, focusing particularly on the reactions to the ‘crisis’ of 1992. That time, government reacted to more than 400,000 refugees from the Balkan wars with severe restrictions of the right to asylum, framed also within the ‘Dublin Regulation’ of the European Union. It is argued that German politics of immigration was mostly a kind of Realpolitik that subordinated humanitarian considerations to closed-border politics geared at keeping migrants out. Summer 2015, however, saw elements of humanitarianism in German refugee politics, understood, following Didier Fassin, as the introduction of moral sentiments into politics. This ‘humanitarianism’ was mostly accredited to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet the commitment of thousands of members of the German public ensured the sustainability of a ‘welcome culture’ intended to accommodate refugees, government politics quickly reverted to new restrictions that keep immigrants for many months or even years in a limbo of waiting. While to some extent government’s humanitarian discourse continues it becomes apparent that humanitarian politics is often a cover up for ulterior political motives. It is concluded that marking the events of 2015 as a refugee crisis enables in the first place the legitimization of politics of restriction like the externalization of EU borders into North African countries.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

The politics of suffering: from the survivor-witness to humanitarian witnessing

This essay engages with the work of the French anthropologist, sociologist and psychiatrist Didier Fassin on the proliferation of the language of trauma and suffering in the late twentieth century. It shows the benefit of taking a long historical view. It describes the fashioning of the ‘survivor-witness’ during the 1961 Eichmann trial and its symbolic connection to the humanitarian witness that emerged in the 1990s. By illustrating the historical processes by which each of these two figures became a ‘witness’, it reveals the conditions under which traumatized victims are assigned a negative or positive cultural valence.

A moral economy of suspicion: Love and marriage migration management practices in the United Kingdom

This article investigates how marriage migration management practices in the United Kingdom (UK) have entered the realm of security policy by relying on a moral political economy of suspicion that notably mobilizes what I call ‘technologies of love.’ The latter refers to conceptions of ‘true love’ and its manifestations that infuse the regulation of belonging through immigration controls. I argue that this economy of suspicion builds on and partakes in a governmental regulation that result in a stratification of rights. After outlining how Western romantic love has a history that cannot be uncoupled from state concerns about race and citizenship, I detail how Didier Fassin’s notion of moral economy of suspicion relates to technologies of love in the governmentality of marriage migration. Finally, I examine recent legislation and policing practices in the UK to illustrate how technologies of love can become part of judgment formation in evaluating possibly suspicious couples, notably European citizens marrying non-European citizens.

Stalin’s humanitarian government: class, child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.

The Practice of Critique: A Comment on Fassin

Building on Didier Fassin’s astute and timely paper, I propose to reflect on the practice of critique by considering its beginnings, its mediations, and the ends to which it is deployed. I also consider the role of ethnographers in advancing critical practices.

Finding indigenous critique in the archives: Thoughts on Didier Fassin’s ‘The Endurance of Critique’

Attending to the production and reception of critique produced by anthropologists’ interlocutors, in the field and in the archives, can help shore up the project of critical ethnography called for by Didier Fassin. A comparison of two moments of critique initiated by Fayiz Sayigh on behalf of Palestinians struggling against Israeli colonialism highlights the ways that the same kinds of critique of power gain traction in different institutional and historical contexts. The expansion of critical ethnography to include a historical ethnography of critique itself, tracing the effects of critique or its dissipation in the past, would yield further insights into the nature and power (or weakness) of the practice of critique today.

Critique, risqué: A comment on Didier Fassin

In response to Didier Fassin’s penetrating argument about the enduring role of critique in anthropology, the present comment suggests that the most powerful critical moment for anthropology may derive from its encounter with ethnographical materials that have the power reflexively to reconfigure its analytical infrastructure. But if this is the case, then critique itself, as a part of anthropology’s analytical infrastructure, must also be subject to the same critical operation, open to experimental redefinition as and when its encounters with ethnography make a difference to it. In the current atmosphere of ‘post-truth’, this might be one of the most politically consequent risks anthropology needs to take with itself.

Perishability and Desolation: Disaster and the Racialization of Suffering in the Neoliberal Therapeutic Memoir

Perishability and Desolation:Disaster and the Racialization of Suffering in the Neoliberal Therapeutic Memoir Corinne Wohlford (bio) As a photographer and filmmaker, Gerard Thomas Straub realized that, although he had traveled to Haiti immediately after its catastrophic 2010 earthquake, he had no particular skills to use to help victims. "I was already feeling useless and unneeded," he writes about his visit; "Everyone else was saving lives. I was filming." Although he professes that he exhibited the "utmost sensitivity and sympathy" as he filmed, he soon "enraged" a medical doctor and his patient, who expelled him from a recovery room. Dejected, Straub reflects, "I questioned my reasons for being there. Was I helping the people of Haiti?" (Straub 67, 68). Scholars of humanitarian accounts of suffering have sometimes suggested that witness testimony like Straub's can, indeed, engender meaningful intervention in such crises. Didier Fassin, for instance, insists, "[T]he sympathy felt for the misfortune of one's neighbors generates the moral indignation that can prompt action to end it" (Fassin 1). The dissemination of moving stories and images builds what Fassin calls "humanitarian reason"—a "morally driven, politically ambiguous, and deeply paradoxical strength of the weak" (xii). This sentiment, in turn, legitimizes interventions from the state, from nongovernmental organizations, and from individuals. In fact, argues Fassin, testimony [End Page 93] becomes viewed as equally important to aid itself. Likewise, in their study of human rights memoirs, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue that since the 1980s, "life narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims" (1) and that these narratives include not only those of the victims, but also of the witnesses, who play "a central role in the formulation of new rights protections" (16). Yet narratives like Straub's call these assertions into question. While Straub's narrative is clearly one of a witness—he is, after all, a photographer and videographer—he is unable to point to any particular course of ameliorative action for the earthquake victims in Haiti. Although Straub confronts profound questions about the utility of documenting the suffering of victims, his story quickly resolves this tension over witnessing. Reeling from his expulsion from the recovery room, Straub first collects himself. He then encounters another doctor, a volunteer in Haiti. This second doctor relates a story about a friend who had come to serve the Haitian people and who became disheartened when he failed the first two patients he encountered. Straub remembers, "After finishing the story, the doctor looked at me and said, '… Normal conventions don't apply in postearthquake Haiti. Don't let being tossed out of the recovery room bother you'" (70). Cheered, Straub abandons his self-questioning in favor of describing, sometimes in graphic detail, the physical and material suffering of Haitians. It is unclear in his text what humanitarian work he undertakes, and he does not reflect again on the voyeuristic nature of his stay. Indeed, Straub's text acknowledges but quickly banishes any uncomfortable feelings related to suffering in favor of comforting self-reassurance and maintenance of the geopolitical status quo. He brushes aside any concerns that might undercut his authority with an argument that Haiti is so fundamentally flawed that any action taken there with good intentions is morally justifiable. Haiti thus becomes framed as a site of inevitable hopelessness and simultaneously as a therapeutic moral landscape through which authors can work out personal problems, project their own virtues, or feel connected to humanity in ways that often seem inaccessible to them within the privileged site of the United States. This essay argues that this is typical of first-person, book-length texts penned by Americans who traveled to Haiti after its 2010 earthquake or to Japan after its 2011 tsunami. Despite significant differences—memoirs about Haiti are numerous, written by nonprofessional writers, [End Page 94] and tend to be self-published or published with very small houses, while the most significant memoir of postdisaster Japan is by noted travel writer Gretel Ehrlich—the narratives featured here replicate what communications scholar Dana L. Cloud calls "rhetorics of therapy," which "encourage identification with therapeutic values: individualism, familism, self-help, and self-absorption" in order to...

Life-Saving Weapons: The Biolegitimacy of Drone Warfare

Abstract This essay uses the theoretical lens of biolegitimacy to advance rhetorical criticism on contemporary drone warfare. As coined by anthropologist Didier Fassin, biolegitimacy describes the emergent preference for “life itself” under humanitarianism. Recasting biolegitimacy as a rhetorical achievement illuminates the strategies by which the United States accrues biolegitimacy for its drone program. In official White House rhetorics, the remotely piloted aircraft that strike over nonrecognized theaters of war, such as Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, are packaged in the “saving lives” logic of biolegitimacy. After exploring three rhetorical strategies of official drone rhetorics for achieving biolegitimacy, I suggest that drones themselves act as key distributors of biolegitimate social worth in the War on Terror.

“On the Whole We Don't:” Michel Foucault, Veena Das and Sexual Violence

Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist Veena Das's work on sexual violence, this paper considers the surprising use by a number of contemporary post-Foucauldian theorists of the resources made available by philosopher Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein as an alternative for the analysis of everyday violence. Having discussed a further tenor of criticism of Foucault – suggestions that the articulation of biopolitics and its forms of indirect murder as a general phenomenon fail to describe the prior or framing conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others to becoming disposable life – the paper reconstructs a new lexicon of terms devised by Das which would be more adequate to such analysis. In fact, the paper argues that Foucault is just as available for such reconfiguration as other theorists to whom Das responds differently.

The Herero: Witnessing Germany's “Other Genocide”

ABSTRACTIn 2015, for the first time in 111 years, top German government followed postcolonial historical scholarship, literary production, and political activism in recognizing part of the German-Herero-Nama Colonial War of 1904-1908 for what it was: the first genocide of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Didier Fassin's genealogy of classical definitions of “witness” and Judith Butler's theorizing the wartime rationale of differentiating between lives worth protecting and lives that can be destroyed with impunity, this article investigates diverse German, Herero and related African written and oral testimonies to explore: the spectrum of witness accounts—referred to as “multiperspectivity” in this article—and the attendant perspectives and agendas; the value or lack thereof placed on the life or death of members of witnesses’ own or their enemy's race in the colonial context; and the significance such witness accounts have for today's views on the Herero genocide.

Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. By Didier Fassin. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. 320 pp. $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. By Didier Fassin. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. 320 pp. $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.This fascinating book examines the punitive French police practices that triggered widespread rioting in French cities in 2005. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the time of those rebellions, the analysis reveals how police officers justified their practices and why the people subjected these practices so deeply resented them. The analysis has wide relevance beyond the French context.The author focuses on particular situations, a concept similar in some ways the police-civilian encounter that is the subject of many U.S. studies, but with special attention participants' understanding of is it that's going on here? (p. 148, quoting Goffman). What is going on is intense, ongoing stopping, identity checking, and frisking. Fassin shows that the meaning of these practices amounts deliberate humiliation of young racial minority men that is justified by an understanding of these targets as a foreign and dangerous element. This ongoing humiliation serves enforce these youths' subordination in a hierarchical social order.The police studied by Fassin are mainly young working class white men from small towns assigned the poor racial minority banlieues (suburbs). From politicians' rhetoric and police training they learn that they must use extraordinary measures bring order an alien jungle rife with violent crime. Their official insignias express this targeting: one is a rifle-scope cross-hairs centered on a high-rise public housing project. Ironically, rates of violent crime are down in France as in other industrialized countries, and so the French anticrime squads patrol in boredom, waiting long hours for the rare emergency call. Lacking the need respond crime, they make proactive stops ostensibly aimed at preventing it. They target young men, singly or in groups, demand identity papers and make frisks. Needing make arrests show that they are doing their job, they arrest for trivial offenses. Often these arrests seem remarkably perverse: the adolescent boy sitting with friends on his apartment's stoop, arrested for failing bring his identity papers that he says he can retrieve from his apartment if only allowed do this, or the young man arrested for responding a provocation deliberately aimed at achieving this result.Although the police occasionally beat people, Fassin observes that the meaning of violence extends deeper and beyond the physical act. It takes the form of what he calls moral violence, or the deliberate, almost sadistic humiliation, both of those physically beaten and those who, while not touched, are cruelly degraded. In nearly every stop the police cast insults, often pushing the point painfully and deeply, to institute a relationship of abasement and mortification (p. …