Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Professor Martin’s research areas span sociocultural anthropology; policing, politics, law, security, justice, governance, administration and democracy; China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He describes himself as an anthropologist of policing, with “policing” understood as both the governance of security and the administration of justice. Given the foundational significance of policing to modern social order this is an appropriate (if still somewhat unconventional) focus for anthropology conceived as the broad science of the human condition. It is also a useful framework within which to develop interdisciplinary conversations that bring social science, natural science and the humanities into a constructive dialogue about the issues of our times.
He is presently working on the following three questions:
- How does culture affect policing?
- How culturally flexible is the ideal of “democratic” policing?
- Can democratic policing deal adequately with environmental problems?
His area of geographic concern is “Greater China,” including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Modern administrative institutions were established in these three places through different political histories, and this historical diversity is manifest in radically different contemporary architectures of governance. At the same time, all three places share elements of a common cultural heritage. This makes their contemporary contrasts a sort of natural experiment for studying interaction between historical institutions and cultural processes (especially interesting for thinking about the cultural bases of democracy). Finally, the rapid industrialization of the region has placed environmental problems at the center of contemporary policy and police concern.
Panel 1 | Global Regimes and 20th-century China
Taiwan as Method for Writing the World History of Policing
Abstract
The institutions of modern police circulate globally. Over the past two centuries, they have become foundational to every form of state-based government which presently exists. What does this mean about the nature and possibility of contemporary politics? A deeply pessimistic engagement with this question has emerged over last decade.
Driven by outraged reaction to highly publicized events of police brutality, a new historiography of modern police has emerged which radicalizes and extends the long-standing critique of nationalist interpretations of police as simple agents of state power, by introducing a novel ‘abolitionist’ story which figures police powers as purely repressive and exploitative.
My paper develops a critical perspective on this new abolitionist story, articulated on the basis of a study of the role that police powers have played in Taiwanese history. Where abolitionist critiques present police as a sort of ‘Anti-Redemptive Apparatus’ (i.e. the antithesis of the universalizing sects which bring a redemptive engagement with dialogical transcendence into the cultural nexus of power, to use a series of categories borrowed from Prasenjit Duara’s work), I argue that that Taiwanese policing preserves a historical lineage of practices which provide the disciplines necessary for democratic liberty to be possible (to use Francis Dodsworth’s conceptual formulation).
In other words, Taiwanese policing continues to operate through a cultural nexus of powers which holds open the possibility of redemptive collective action, rather than (as abolitionist argue) serving as a blunt instrument foreclosing alternatives to the brutalist monopoly of sovereign reason.
This example is a useful reminder of how the project of creating a historiography adequate to the imperatives of our times can be facilitated by engagement with circulatory history grounded in in East Asian experience.
