Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience. Based on ethnographic research conducted in sites from alcohol treatment clinics in Russia to Pentecostal addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are linked by the contributors' attention to the dynamics including the cultural, scientific, legal, religious, personal, and social that shape the meaning of "addiction" in particular settings. They examine how it is understood and experienced among...

What is it that police and policing actually do? What are the effects? How are these effects mediated and experienced by different people at different times and in different contexts? This volume draws attention to the centrality of police and policing to the project of governance and the experience of being human in the contemporary world.

This book makes the case for an anthropological approach to the study of policing. Even beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have much to contribute to broader scholarship in police studies.

Including original and international contributions from both senior and emerging scholars, this pioneering book represents a foundational document for a burgeoning field of study: the anthropology of police. As such, it highlights the particular challenges as well as...