Policy worlds : anthropology and the analysis of contemporary power

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy-making has progressively reached into the structure of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into the systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining, or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested, and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Furthermore, anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. As the contributors to this volume identify and analyze these policy worlds new possibilities for a reciprocal understanding of the positioning of academics within systems of knowledge and power are opened up.