Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain

Surveillancethe mediated monitoring of human behaviour for some intended purposehas become part of the structure of European life.

As ubiquitous monitoring technologies transform every new relationship that they mediate, there is grave concern that the social gains of past centuries will be lost, as states and large corporations use these technologies to expand and entrench their own power.

Scholars of surveillance have been following these developments since the 1970s, but recently have faced the paradox that most surveillance now takes place with the active collaboration of the surveilled.

Moreover, the enthusiasm for self-monitoring popularized through smart technologies has been met by many surveillance scholars with bewilderment.

Why would people choose to enter relationships objectively deemed to be coercive?This project takes a new approach to how we understand surveillance.

I embark on the first sustained inquiry into the association between surveillance and moral community, between practices of watching over and the presence of a group of people who share a commitment to certain goods.

By ethnographically investigating the role that surveillance technologies play in realizing four different types of goodcare, health, safety and citizenshipwithin four different communitiesthe family, the interest group, the circle of intimates, and the nationthis research explores how surveillance proliferates not as a lever in power relations, but by being harnessed to forms of human welfare.The gains of this project are substantial.

To surveillance studies I import insights from anthropology, offering a comparative and embedded approach that situates surveillance as a social relationship. I also initiate a major conversation about surveillance in anthropology.

Finally I develop the concepts of moral and immoral monitoring, achieving greater public clarity on those forms of surveillance that support collective welfare, and those that threaten to harm it.