6 x 9. 272 pgs. 3 drawings, 5 photographs, 10 tables, 3 maps. (2000) Cloth 978-0-472-11071-1 $75.00S  Available Add to Cart Paper 978-0-472-08832-4 $29.95S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Subjects Anthropology / Asian Studies / Law

The Network Inside Out

Annelise Riles

Winner: American Society of International Law's 2001 Certificate of Merit

A fascinating study of institutional knowledge practices

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About the Book

"Networks" and other artifacts of institutional life, such as documents, funding proposals, newsletters, and organizational charts, are such ubiquitous aspects of the information age that they go unnoticed to most observers of late modern society. In this new kind of work in the ethnography of legality, Annelise Riles takes a sophisticated theoretical approach to the aesthetics of such artifacts by analyzing the experiences of a group of Fijian bureaucrats and activists preparing for and participating in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

In describing and theorizing this aspect of transnational existence, Riles enacts a new ethnographic method for apprehending the network from the inside out. Working with the premise that anthropologists are inside the network—that they are producers, consumers, and aesthetes, not simply observers, of the artifacts of late modern institutional life—she produces a fascinating study of institutional knowledge practices and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of transnational phenomena.

Annelise Riles is Assistant Professor, Northwestern School of Law, and Research Fellow, American Bar Association.