Doctoral Dissertation Research: Everyday Policing and its Publics in Contemporary India

在公众与国家的冲突中，警察是中心人物，而公众与警察的冲突又通常通过法律的和官僚形式的写作来调解。本论文分析了这些警察写作形式的生产和流通，以研究这些记录实践如何制约警察与公众的关系，以及这些形式本身如何被不同的话语实践所部署。本研究通过研究独立后的印度警察与公众之间的关系，探讨了现代国家在日常生活中所经历的多重中介。根据印度刑事诉讼法，维持治安的一个关键属性是要求对例行刑事调查保留大量文件记录，以规范警察在调查过程中与公众的互动，并允许警察上级和审判法院进行机构监督。无论是对公众还是对民族志学者来说，这些文件都是了解警察日常做法的关键点。研究的重点将是这些文件的社会生活，以研究它们在塑造日常生活中的作用。该项目是一项关于警察记录做法的人种学研究;并分析这些警察文件在“宣传”要求的指导下发挥作用的关键话语形式：司法声明，其对“公众”的修辞演说，犯罪是以其名义被起诉的，媒体对犯罪的报道，其对理想公众的表演性召唤，以支持警务工作。因此，研究方法的目的是通过多地点人种学三角测量。

In the quotidian encounter of the public with the state, the police are central figures and this public encounter with the police in turn is typically mediated through legal and bureaucratic forms of writing. This dissertation project analyzes the production and circulation of these forms of writing by the police in order to study the ways in which these documentary practices condition the relationship of the police with its public and as these forms are themselves deployed by different kinds of discursive practices. The study examines the multiple mediations through which the modern state is experienced in everyday life by studying the relationship between policing and its publics in post-independence India. A crucial attribute of policing under Indian criminal procedure law is the requirement to keep extensive documentary records of routine criminal investigations to regulate the police interaction with the public during the course of investigation as well as to allow for institutional oversight, both by their police superiors and by the trial courts. These documents are the key points of access to police practices in their everyday materiality, whether for the public or for the ethnographer. The focus of the research will be on the social life of these documents in order to examine their role in shaping everyday life. The project is an ethnographic study of police practices of documentation; and an analysis of key discursive forms in which these police documents are brought into play guided by claims of "publicity": judicial pronouncements, with their rhetorical address to "the public" in whose name crime is prosecuted and media representations of crime, with their performative summoning of an ideal public to support policing efforts. The research methodology is thus aimed at a triangulation through multi-sited ethnography.