At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions

305 Pages·2015·1.763 MB·English

by  Didier Fassin

At the Heart of the State
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Professor Christina Garsten, Stockholm University
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At the Heart
of the State
The Moral World of Institutions
Didier Fassin
with
Yasmine Bouagga
Isabelle Coutant
Jean-Sébastien Eideliman
Fabrice Fernandez
Nicolas Fischer
Carolina Kobelinsky
Chowra Makaremi
Sarah Mazouz
Sébastien Roux
Translated by
Patrick Brown and Didier Fassin
First published in French 2013 by Seuil
First English language edition published 2015 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Didier Fassin 2015
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN978 0 7453 3560 5 Hardback
ISBN978 0 7453 3559 9 Paperback
ISBN978 1 7837 1311 0 PDF eBook
ISBN978 1 7837 1313 4 Kindle eBook
ISBN978 1 7837 1312 7 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
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Contents
Series Preface vii
Vered Amit and Christina Garsten
Acknowledgments viii
Can States be Moral? Preface to the English Edition ix
Didier Fassin
Introduction: Governing Precarity 1
Didier Fassin
Part 1 Judging
1. The Right to Punish: Assessing Sentences in Immediate
Appearance Trials 15
Chowra Makaremi
2. Justice for Immigrants: The Work of Magistrates in
Deportation Proceedings 40
Nicolas Fischer
3. In Search of Truth: How Asylum Applications Are Adjudicated 67
Carolina Kobelinsky
Part 2 Repressing
4. Maintaining Order: The Moral Justifications for Police Practices 93
Didier Fassin
5. Sanctioning Behind Bars: The Humanization of Retribution in Prison 117
Fabrice Fernandez
6. Assisting or Controlling? When Social Workers Become
Probation Officers 144
Yasmine Bouagga
vi CONTENTS
Part 3 Supporting
7. Discipline and Educate: Contradictions Within the Juvenile
Justice System 171
Sébastien Roux
8. Listening to Suffering: The Treatment of Mental Fragility at a
Home for Adolescents 197
Isabelle Coutant and Jean-Sébastien Eideliman
9. Profiling Job Seekers: The Counseling of Youths at an
Employment Center 225
Sarah Mazouz
Conclusion: Raisons d’État 255
Didier Fassin
Glossary 262
Bibliography 269
List of Contributors 282
Index 284
Series Preface
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal
with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions—to
paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small
places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from
an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and to
offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership,
but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If
anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then
it must surely be through such research.
We start from the question: “What can this ethnographic material tell us about
the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?” rather than “What
can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?” Put this way
round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather
than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once
said, “Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.”
By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of “place”—
within political, economic, religious, or other social systems. We therefore
publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements,
occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist
movements; but also work that is more thematically based—on kinship, landscape,
the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume:
ethnographic monographs, comparative texts, edited collections, and shorter,
polemical essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world,
which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate
anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary
world.
Professor Vered Amit
Professor Christina Garsten
Acknowledgments
This research is the fruit of a five-year scientific program funded by an Advanced
Grant from the European Council for Research awarded to Didier Fassin (for an
overview of the program and a complete list of the publications and events which
resulted from it, see http://morals.ias.edu/). Both the French version and its English
translation have been the product of the close collaboration of the ten contributors
in the theoretical conception, the empirical approach and ultimately the writing
of the research. We therefore consider that this book has a genuine collective
authorship. We are grateful for the comments we received from colleagues and
friends when presenting our initial findings, particularly during the conference
“Au Coeur de l’État. Comment les Institutions Traitent leur Public,” which was
held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, as well as during
seminars and discussions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. We
wish to thank in particular João Biehl, Fabienne Brion, Manuela Ivone Cunha,
Vincent Dubois, Benoit Dupont, Anthony Good, Carol Greenhouse, Bernard
Harcourt, Fabien Jobard, Bruno Karsenti, Danièle Lochak, Steven Lukes, Gérard
Mauger, José-Luis Moreno, Adriana Petryna, Richard Rechtman, and Marc-Henri
Soulet. We also wish to thank Estelle Girard, Émilie Jacquemot, and Monique Da
Silva in Paris and Donne Petito and Linda Garat in Princeton for their assistance
in the various stages of this project. We express our gratitude to David Castle for
his warm support of the project at Pluto Press and to Patrick Brown for his patient
and careful translation realized in collaboration with Didier Fassin. Finally, we
wish to recognize all those whose willing participation and generous availability
have made this work possible—the police officers and commissioners, magistrates
and lawyers, prison guards, counselors and directors, social workers and special
educators, psychologists and psychiatrists as well as the publics of the institutions
that we have studied.
Can States Be Moral?
Preface to the English Edition
What is a state? Answers to this question vary, depending on whether they are
provided by a political philosopher, a political scientist, a legal scholar, or a
historian. In the present book, we propose our own response as sociologists and
anthropologists. But rather than in its disciplinary configuration, the specificity
of our approach resides in its method: ethnography. A political organization
governing a given territory and its population, the state is generally studied in
terms of its formation, structure, functions, laws, and relations with other similar
entities. Such an approach presupposes not only a macropolitical perspective,
which tends to produce a relatively abstract representation from above, but also an
a priori definition, which delimits the scope of the study.
Our method adopts a symmetrical view. It is inductive, micropolitical, and from
below. It is based on the participant observation of various institutions through
the routine work of their agents and the everyday interactions with their publics.
We do not determine in advance what the police, the justice system, the prison
apparatus, the welfare services, and the mental health facilities are, but we examine
the situations and problems which the people who belong to these institutions are
confronted with, and analyze how they manage them: our theory of the state is
therefore constructed empirically. We do not presume that it is a unified entity,
but explore the diversity of its rationalities: we analyze, for instance, the tensions
and contradictions existing between the logics of security and rights, the principles
of coercion and responsibility. The state, we believe, is what its agents do under
the multiple influences of the policies they implement, the habits they develop,
the initiatives they take, and the responses they get from their publics. By inverting
traditional perspectives, whether they be normative or deductive, ethnography
thus offers a unique way of approaching the state.
But the question “what is a state?” only makes sense within a given national
context at a particular historical moment. The word “state” does not mean or
evoke the same thing in France, where our study was conducted as it does in the
United States, where it may be discussed. In the French context, there is a certain
self-evidence of the state, built over a thousand years. It benefits from an enduring
legitimacy and raises high expectations. Strong and centralized, it defines most
norms and policies. In contrast, in the United States, the word can suggest either
the federal state or one of the fifty entities which comprise it. In the first case,
it is an institution with limited prerogatives and declining legitimacy in most
domains, except those of national security and foreign affairs. In the second one, it