Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics (review)

"Modernity" and "governmentality" may be two of the most overused terms in anthropology today. Yet Jonathan Xavier Inda's new collection of essays, Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics is a welcome addition to the literature on both topics. Combining five widely-cited and influential anthropological essays on governmentality with five new chapters, the volume's essays reflect on the question of modernity as an empirical and ethnographic object, materialized across a range of geographic and historical sites. The chapters cover historical periods ranging from 19th century colonialism to the invention of the future through the Human Genome Project, and geographic areas from Southeast Asia to French Guiana, Italy, Brazil, and Ukraine. Along the way, the various authors engage with an equally broad selection of Foucault's work, with the goal of explicating and extending the concepts of biopower, discipline, and governmentality as constituting particularly modern forms of power.

In a refreshingly brief introduction, Inda offers a concise outline of the ways that Foucault's approaches to the question of modernity developed over the course of his writing. While he chooses "governmentality" as his organizing concept, the introduction sets the conceptual framework of the volume's essays by describing how Foucault engaged with the question of modern forms of power across his work—theorizing how power governs human bodies, practices of life and death, and the understanding and management of human difference, historically, geographically, culturally, and politically. To address the question of how modern government—the conduct of conduct—is materialized in practices across time and space, Inda arranges the chapters according to various means by which the social and biological life of human beings is organized and governed.

The first section, "Colonial Reason," directly addresses a problem with Foucault's genealogy of modern government that anthropologists have long noted—that his work was premised entirely on the history and practices of the West. Inda first reprints a chapter from David Scott's 1999 book Refashioning Futures: Critique After Postcolonialty, which argues forcefully and eloquently for an approach based on governmentality to understand the politics and histories of colonialism as transformations in the forms and rationalities of modern power. In the next chapter, Peter Redfield contributes a piece that builds upon Scott's arguments. Using Foucault's discussion of the panopticon as his starting point, Redfield explores the "productive failure" of the notorious French penal colony Devil's Island. Redfield finds that the high prison mortality rate demonstrated that the penal colony failed miserably in its ostensible goal of producing rehabilitated subjects, yet this very failure highlights the ways that ruptures and contingencies in regimes of colonial power still produced modern colonial subjects.

The second section, "Global Governance," reprints two well known articles on governmentality and state power: Aiwha Ong's "Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia" and James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta's "Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality." Both focus on the ways that approaches based in governmentality can explicate regimes of neoliberal politics. Ong looks at the ways that neoliberal politics in Indonesia and Malaysia have created different tiers of citizens, as nation-states devolve power to global corporations in the name of national development. Gupta and Ferguson focus on the ways that state-based power is uneven across national territories, as neoliberal regimes cede power to extra-territorial entities such as the World Bank or NGOs. Section Three, "Technico Sciences," expands the volume's engagement with Foucault, drawing upon arguments from Power/Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, and The History of Sexuality to investigate how the production and deployment of scientific authority creates and manages new populations and new forms of power to govern them—in this case, "criminal types" in 19^th century Italy, and radiation victims in Chernobyl. Adriana Petryna's chapter on the management of the Chernobyl aftermath is a chilling story of how competing scientific expertise around the definitions of radiation dose thresholds was linked to changing social...