Technologies of truth in the anthropology of conflict: AES/APLA Presidential Address, 2013

Abstract

Science and technology studies can help to unveil invisible modes of power that are embedded in the ways conflicts are known, debated, and resolved. Legal forms of adjudication, reporting systems used by international commissions, and data gathering on the part of governmental and nongovernmental agencies shape how conflicts are fought out on the ground and in policy arenas. Assumptions about evidence, categorization, adjudication, and measurement privilege certain forms of suffering over others, even as they omit phenomena that defy categorization. Using two examples—a global survey of violence against women and a U.S. government initiative to defer the deportation of certain undocumented immigrants—we bring insights from science and technology studies to bear on sociolegal phenomena. In so doing, we highlight tensions between measurement and invention, visibility and invisibility, and objectivity and discretion that are intrinsic to new forms of governance. We thus examine what measurement initiates and precludes, the reactive and proactive nature of technologies, and how new practices reproduce established techniques.

Audit Culture Revisited

“…I have written about "indicator culture," a closely related term that refers to the use of measurement systems as taken-for-granted ways of assessing truth and making decisions (Merry and Coutin 2014), but this raises similar questions about the status of the culture concept. As the authors helpfully point out, they are not using the term to describe a type of society such as "feudal society" but instead a set of dispositions and practices and a rationality of governance.…”

“Bushmen” in the Law: Evidence and Identity in Botswana's High Court

“…Rather, it remained a strictly technical category used to register the claimants in the case, both during the legal process and extending into its effects in the period after judgment; it was simply a way to create and number the legal subjects inside a court room, to whom the eventual verdict would apply. Paraphrasing Merry and Coutin's (, 2) observation about indicators in another context, a technology for producing “justice” shaped the way that people were managed.…”

Challenging Gendered Inequalities in Global Health: Dilemmas for NGOs

“…Many of these norms are enforced through funding mechanisms such as contracting and payment-by-results (PBR). The emphasis that is now placed on measurement creates a system of knowledge or 'technology of truth' (Merry, 2011;Merry and Coutin, 2014) that is reproduced by both funding structures and the organizations that work within it. Current mainstream thinking in global health has established that randomized control trials (RCTs) are the 'gold standard' for determining what is or is not effective and producing appropriate evidence.…”

“…As a consequence, funding decisions for health interventions, even within a development context, have tended to favour projects employing RCTs in the belief that results from these projects will be more reliable because they can be more easily evaluated (Adams, 2013: 58). The emphasis that is now placed on measurement creates a system of knowledge or 'technology of truth' (Merry, 2011;Merry and Coutin, 2014) that is reproduced by both funding structures and the organizations that work within it. Yet the knowledge underpinning these 'technologies of truth' within science and medicine are frequently gender biased (Goldenberg, 2006).…”