Crime's Power: Anthropologists And The Ethnography Of Crime

"The essays that make up "Crime's Power" draw upon the best tools of anthropology to attack, undermine, and encircle the issue of 'crime.' They provide fresh insights into the social category 'crime' and a fascinating window into major issues of power, law, development, neoliberalism, and globalization generally. Fun to read and at the same time theoretically rich..."--Bryant Garth, Director, American Bar Foundation"What does it mean to take an anthropological perspective on crime? This important volume revisits the critically important insight that crime is a socially constructed category and shows its implications for governance and power around the world. Challenging the current preoccupation with crime control, this radical perspective examines how actions come to be defined as crimes and explores whose interests are served by these definitions in case studies from Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the U.S."--Sally Engle Merry, professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College

The changes that are engulfing the world today--the fall of nation-states and dictatorships, migrations and border crossings, revolution, democratization, and the international spread of capital--call for new approaches to the subject of crime. Anthropologists engage a variety of methods to answer that call in Crime's Power. Their view of crime extends into the intimacies of everyday life as war transforms personal identities, the violence of a serial killer inhabits paintings, and as the feel of imprisonment reveals society's potentials. Moving beyond the fixities of law, this book explores the nature of crime as an expression of power across the spectrum of human differences.