This study follows calls for more examinations of the roles played by experts in contemporary life, considering them as human subjects themselves, rather than as proxies for analysis of the institutions they are part of (Boyer 2008). The anthropology of experts represents an emerging area of study, with many common points of emphasis on the nature of expertise. Within this framing, expertise is not viewed as a property one possesses, but rather something which must be acted out: an expert must be recognized as such by others.
In a review of current expertise literature, Anthropologist Summerson Carr points out that the common framings of expertise studies “consistently assert that expertise manifests in power relations that are both repressive and productive, and it reproduces these relations when
expressed by disciplined social actors (i.e., experts and laypeople)” (Carr 2010:18). Thus, expert opinion relies on official forms of knowledge and continues to create and add to those bodies of (official) knowledge; knowledge which has the power to make possible certain social
interventions while foreclosing others. These knowledges also “formulate” (19) individuals by creating ways of describing, categorizing, and making decisions about them. These formulations of individuals exist in reference to a larger population, which serves as an object of study and theorization. The processes by which experts are ‘made’ and made valid through institutions – as they are trained, certified, and employed – is therefore interwoven with the knowledges that these institutions create.
This (Foucaultian) analysis that emphasizes the effects of expertise risks overlooking the messy and day-to-day ways that expertise can be constructed and practiced. Contemporary scholars emphasize ways that expertise is learned, via training processes, and in socialization with other experts. Expertise is also tenuous- experts must continually re-assert their expertise to maintain their status. They do this by performing their expertise both to other experts, to the institutions that give them legitimacy, and to the non-experts who must exist as an audience for expertise.
2. Expertise makes legible (and apolitical)
Development scholar James C. Scott, in studying processes of state formation and state rule, suggests that the legibility of a society is “a central problem in statecraft” (10). This drive for increased legibility begins with simple yet powerful state tools (tax records, cadastral
property maps, e.g.) but becomes expansive, encompassing more details and data as time passes. The state requires making subjects legible to be able to know them and act upon them: the
position of state knowledge is a privileged and (semi)-sovereign position, even as these state actions fall short of complete sovereign control6. Scott writes that,
State simplifications … are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like U.S. highway
patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy a quasi-monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society (Scott 1998:79).
Crucially, this view of society is not complete, as the schematic view simplifies and reduces. Individuals are not visible in their entirety: legibility works by measuring and recording information, but also by ignoring or discarding other information as irrelevant.
Expertise in solving problems is also intrinsically linked to the expert’s view of what constitutes a problem in the first place. The “intelligible field” (J. Ferguson 1990) of expertise – the bounded set of accepted knowledges of how problems may be defined, and what forms of intervention are possible – operates by reformulating political questions as technical issues, reserved for the domain of experts, a process that James Ferguson refers to as “anti-politics.” This de-politicizing is also described as the “rendering technical” of a problem: “Experts are trained to frame problems in technical terms. This is their job. Their claim to expertise depends on their capacity to diagnose problems in ways that match the kinds of solutions that fall within their repertoire” (Li 2007:10).
For this study, it is important to stress that expertise need not be “technical” in a
quantifiable sense. Nikolas Rose discusses the creation of multiple domains of expertise through the concurrent creating of specific communities, defined as objects of expertise by the
“problems” they face and which necessitate expert management (Rose 1993; Rose 1996). The ability to assert that there are a group of people “at-risk” is to make a technical proclamation.
6 Cadastral mapping, for example, does not necessarily lead to the levying of property taxes; but it creates property owners as a visible and intelligible group to be governed (including, potentially, through
While the category of “at-risk youth”, for example, is often defined via individual behavior (defiance, e.g.), its creation as a category is still an act of rendering a problem “anti-political,” and cloisters it for the intervention of experts (Mitchell 2010).
3. Case Study: Community Psychiatry
In his ethnography of frontline community psychiatry, Paul Brodwin uses the term “everyday ethics” to describe “the fissures and contradictions which are not articulated in a consistent system” (Brodwin 2013:4). These everyday ethics surfaced through moments of doubt and internal conflict. When a client’s wishes (to have greater control over their finances, or to discontinue a medication) are in conflict with the requirements of the job, each caseworker must confront the ethics and basic assumptions underpinning their professional role. But often these moments of conflict are quickly removed from the domain of ethics, and re-framed in technical terms by their supervisors.
Conflicts between caseworkers and supervisors, therefore, become a central focus of his analysis; as these are seen as conflicts between different kinds of claim to expertise. Caseworkers are low-level experts, meant to function as merely an extension of their supervisors- the eyes and ears reporting back to him7, receiving his orders, and acting as his hands to carry them out. In contrast, supervisors are psychiatrists, and are granted an authority through their status as experts in the neuro-chemical model of mental illness underlying all practices at the clinic; the
supervisors’ expertise also produces a certain (chemical) way of reading mental illness. This power of interpretation is expansive: Brodwin documents supervisors who render technical not
7 As is common in many social services settings, most caseworkers – the lowest status job – are women, while the proportion of men seems to increase higher up in the hierarchy of workers.
only the clients’ mental illnesses, but their entire range of behaviors. Caseworkerson the other hand develop an expertise based on personal familiar knowledge of clients, and experience that they alone can draw on, as the only workers making visits to clients’ homes. This is an uneasy sort of expertise, not easily generalizable.
Part 3: Review of Literature on Child Welfare