ABSTRACT
The work of security is intensely ordinary, often just the boring routines of bureaucracy, and it is experienced as such by the public in airports. How might we humanize this work? Noting the “anti-state” bias in anthropology, this chapter pushes for a sympathetic reading of the security bureaucracy, from its routines to the illusions that are in Kantian terms “indispensably necessary.” Drawing from experience with security experts and their “knowledgeable uncertainty” we foreground their limited agency and scarcity of resources, arguing that “rationality” and the “iron cage” are insufficiently nuanced. This chapter proposes a reimagination of the security bureaucracy by focusing on legitimacy, but also telos – public service towards some, always yet to be fully articulated, notion of the collective good.
