Governing Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Labor, Power, and Government

238 Pages·2012·1.619 MB·English

by  Kendra Coulter, William R. Schumann (eds.)

Governing Cultures
Governing Cultures
Anthropological Perspectives on
Political Labor, Power,
and Government
Edited by
Kendra Coulter and
William R. Schumann
GOVERNING CULTURES
Copyright © Kendra Coulter and William R. Schumann, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-1-137-00921-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-43601-9 ISBN 978-1-137-00922-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137009227
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Governing cultures : anthropological perspectives on political
labor, power, and government / edited by Kendra Coulter and
William R. Schumann.
p. cm.
1. Political anthropology. 2. Government policy. 3. Legislative power.
I. Coulter, Kendra, 1979– II. Schumann, William R.
GN492.G67 2012
306.2—dc23 2012010456
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2012
Contents
Acknowledgments v ii
1 Government Matters: Intellectual Labor and
the Work of Governing 1
Kendra Coulter and William R. Schumann
2 Navigating the Illegible State: The Political
Labor of Government in Mexico 21
Tara A. Schwegler
3 A Project of Governing and its Contradictions:
Maternal-Infant Care in Highland Ecuador 4 7
A. Kim Clark
4 Governing Beef: Program Implementation, Unintended
Consequences, and BSE Control in Alberta 69
Alan Smart and Josephine Smart
5 Selling Clear Red Water: The Identity Politics
of Governing in the National Assembly for Wales 9 3
William R. Schumann
6 Legislative Authenticity and the Politics of Recognition:
Being a Ma¯ori Member of the New Zealand Parliament 1 11
Ilana Gershon
7 Gendering Government: Political Labor and
the Production of Policy and Political Culture 137
Kendra Coulter
8 The Work of Being Governed: From the Welfare
State to the “Big Society” in Britain 159
Susan Brin Hyatt
vi Contents
9 The Will To End Hunger in the Age of Security:
Food Security, National Security, and Community-
Based Food Security in the United States 183
David V. Fazzino II
10 The Work of Governing 2 09
John Clarke
List of Contributors 2 33
Index 2 35
Acknowledgments
A
s first-time editors and junior scholars interested in propelling
anthropological analyses of government, the compilation of this book
was itself a kind of political work. Through sessions at the Canadian
Anthropology Society Annual Meetings in 2008 and 2009, and many,
many discussions in person, on the phone, and via email, we worked
through the struggles and possibilities of charting new ground in the
anthropology and ethnography of politics. We are pleased with the
result and hope this book will inspire future research, debate, and
political action.
Like all political work, intellectual labor is a collective endeavor.
We are grateful to each of the contributors for their thoughtful work
and dedication to this volume, and to advancing anthropological con-
tributions to the study of government and politics. We thank Thomas
Wilson for his encouragement and guidance in the early stages of
this project. The capable workers at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly
Robyn Curtis, are acknowledged with gratitude.
I extend an enthusiastic thank you to my coeditor, Billy Schumann,
for his sincere commitment, insightful contributions, and abundantly
good humor. It was a pleasure to work with such a dedicated scholar
and genuine person who managed to laudably balance commitment
to his family with the large workload of coediting this book. Yet I still
want to thank Billy’s family for their patience as we toiled with each
stage of this project. The encouragement and insights of Kim Clark,
John Clarke, Gavin Smith, Krystyna Sieciechowicz, Richard Lee, and
Marjorie Griffin Cohen were greatly appreciated as I researched gov-
ernment and grappled with how anthropologists can best articulate
and analyze the production of politics. I owe my mother, Rebecca
Priegert Coulter, immense thanks for a lifetime of personal and
intellectual guidance, and for instilling in me a desire to bravely and
boldly chart new ground, while always learning from history. I also
viii Acknowledgments
want to acknowledge the nonhuman members of my family, Buster,
Macey, and Solidarity (Kozzie), whose joy and love have been indis-
pensable, especially when the human world of scholarly and political
work becomes most trying. To John Drew I say a very loving thank
you, for his unwavering support of my work, my hopes, my mind, and
my heart, and for bringing me immeasurable happiness.
KENDRA COULTER
I would like to acknowledge the effort and vision of my coeditor,
Kendra Coulter, who has consistently met and exceeded the demands
of this project. I thank Jessie, Garland, and Brecon, without whom
I would not have the inspiration to be a teacher and scholar. I also
thank my family and friends who have always been a source of sup-
port. Finally, I am gratefully and forever indebted to Pat Beaver who
has been a mentor and friend at every step of my intellectual journey.
WILLIAM R. SCHUMANN
1
Government Matters
Intellectual Labor and
the Work of Governing
Kendra Coulter and William R. Schumann
G
overnments matter. Governments initiate, manage, reconstruct,
and/or retract vital public services such as health care, education,
environmental protection, and social welfare. Governments influ-
ence employment, labor relations, investment, and development.
Governments affect projects of war and peace. Governments define
and enforce the terms of citizenship and immigration, and shape how
cultural ideals of belonging, value, and morality are reproduced and
practiced. Yet none of these projects are complete or entirely uni-
fied. Governments are also sites of struggle, possibility, contradiction,
and compromise, and governing is always dependent on the complex
interactions of social actors operating across legal, institutional, and
cultural domains.
Accordingly, this collection demonstrates how anthropologists
can and do enhance our understanding of governing, principally by
advancing ethnographically grounded analyses of the ideas and prac-
tices of those who govern. The chapters unpack the work of govern-
ing to illuminate how governments are produced, reproduced, and
contested in local and state-level bureaucracies; in local, regional, and
national parliaments; and in other multisited, multileveled govern-
ing contexts. Through anthropological lenses, the social action and
strategic inaction that justify, modify, and reproduce political power
and social divisions are revealed. The contributors explore govern-
ment work as negotiated within and across various social, political,
and economic terrains, and through social, political, and economic
discourses. To borrow from parallel discussions about ethnographic
2 Kendra Coulter and William R. Schumann
studies of policy communities, we aim to marshal the theories and
methods of anthropological inquiry to explain “how taken-for-granted
assumptions channel policy debates in certain directions, inform the
dominant ways policy problems are identified, enable particular clas-
sifications of target groups, and legitimize certain policy solutions
while marginalizing others” (Wedel et al. 2005: 34), thereby foster-
ing broader and deeper understanding of government as socially con-
structed. Such a multifaceted and influential political, economic, and
cultural site begs for careful and diverse ethnographic exploration.
By advancing the idea of “governing cultures,” we highlight the mul-
tiple and dynamic relationships between culture(s) and government(s).
The impacts of governing have often been a focus of ethnographic
research. Less common in anthropology, however, are analyses of
specific government cultures or studies of the cultural terrains that
interpenetrate and shape government sites. Accordingly, this volume
emphasizes the importance of analyzing such dynamics, and how
actual practices of governing shape and are shaped by political workers
in diverse cultural contexts.
Across the social sciences, the keywords “government,” “govern-
ing,” “governance,” and “governmentality” are used to identify the
various complexities of legal-institutional, social, material, and dis-
cursive frameworks that define political rule (see chapter ten by John
Clarke in this volume). We explore the commonalities and differences
across these approaches and seek to bring anthropology into broader
discussions about politics and power. In our view, a cultural perspective
on government is as essential to understanding the exercise and repro-
duction of political power as the legal and institutional approaches that
characterize other fields of government studies. At the same time, akin
to colleagues in political science and allied disciplines who are taking
seriously the value of ethnographic methods in their work (e.g., Schatz
2009), we seek to highlight the value of studying government sites as a
means of broadening and deepening anthropological inquiry.
Anthropology has been linked to government from the discipline’s
earliest days, even when acts of governing were not the explicit focus of
anthropological research. The study of “confederation, or the union
of bodies . . . into societies for governmental or other purposes,” was
proposed as a subset of anthropological inquiry as early as the late
nineteenth century (Brinton 1892: 269). Even if few anthropologists
took up this call at the time, the rationale behind such a proposal is
obvious in retrospect. Government agents and agencies had substan-
tial impacts on the non-Western cultures that were the initial subjects
of ethnographic research. Powerful government forces such as the
Bureau of Indian Affairs in the United States and numerous European