ABSTRACT
This chapter examines policing as a social institution, and ethnography as a methodology for understanding this institution, through the lens of a reconsideration of extraction as a social process. It engages critiques by anthropologists and other ethnographers that an ‘extractive imperative’ constitutes a globalized logic of social relations deriving from colonial racial capitalism and is always already a unidirectional and ubiquitously harmful process. It further problematizes assumptions that police are ‘violence workers’ whose raison d’être is to enforce this pervasive extractive relational logic, rendering them reviled institutional agents that must be abolished in order to realize social justice in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with police in northern India and citing cases of police being figured as simultaneously subjects and objects of extraction, this chapter suggests that police are more aptly conceived as ‘security laborers’ who also may be allies in some progressive social movements. It concludes with a provocation to conceive both policing and ethnography as social fields in which mutualistic co-extraction may occur in ways that have the potential to create new relational forms and possibilities for positive transformation on local or even global scales.
