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Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. Cris Shore and Susan Wright, eds. New York: Routledge, 1997. 294 pp.
As I was preparing to testify before a congressional subcommittee (on the effects of U.S. assistance policies to Eastern Europe), I was asked how my credentials should be listed. When I said I was an anthropologist and East European specialist, I was told: "We can't say you're an anthropologist. [Congressional] members will wonder why we asked you." And so I appeared just as an East European specialist despite the fact that my analysis, methods, and approach are anthropological. Many years-and much research and experience-later, I still find myself having to explain why 1, an anthropologist, study policy. The Anthropology of Policy, a collection of articles compiled by British anthropologists Cris Shore and Susan Wright, sets out to fill a wide gap: to make explicit what some anthropologists have long been doing (though sometimes calling it something else). At the heart of this domain of anthropological inquiry is the question: "how do policies 'work' as instruments of governance, and why do they sometimes fail to function as intended?" (p. 3). The book hopefully marks the beginning of a new era of much-needed study by anthropologists of policy-its discourses, mobilizing metaphors, underlying ideologies, uses, and effects on its target populations. The fit between anthropology and policy is actually a natural one. As Shore and Wright point out in their ground-breaking introduction, the study of policy deals with issues at the heart of anthropology such as institutions and power; interpretation and meaning; ideology, rhetoric, and discourse; the politics of culture, ethnicity, and identity; and the global and the local. Anthropological studies of policy have much to contribute to theory and may well reverse the trend in which "practice... rarely informs theory in anthropology,"...