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Book Review: Paul Stenner, Liminality and Experience: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Psychosocial

officers taking bribes (Jauregui, Chapter 3) or apparently ‘fitting up’ a suspect (Durão, Chapter 10). Another topic addressed is whether the presence of a researcher may prompt undesirable activities that would not have occurred otherwise (McCargo, Chapter 9). Equally, though, there is the question of what responsibilities ethnographers have towards the people studied (including police officers), for example in terms of reciprocity (Jauregui, Chapter 3). Finally, the issue of the legitimacy of not revealing one’s attitudes and evaluations, indeed perhaps even giving the impression that one agrees with or approves of what has been said or done, comes into particularly sharp focus where, as one author (Herbert, Chapter 1) admits, he entered the field specifically to collect data that would provide a basis for critically challenging police practices. The editor makes strong claims for the public impact of ethnographic work about policing, as is suggested by the title and subtitle of the book: the implication could even be that ethnography can put the world of policing to right through holding it to account. However, little evidence for such impact is offered in the volume. Furthermore, I am not convinced that the chapters provide much support for the claim that ethnographic work on policing has been ‘reinvented’ – this is to underplay the value of the considerable body of older work on this topic, much of it carried out by sociologists: Bittner; Cain; Chatterton; Manning; Punch; Van Maanen, Westley and others (see Reiner, 1992). Nevertheless, this book offers a stimulating and illuminating set of discussions, useful for what they reveal about the travails of the ethnographer as well as about the operation of the police in diverse contexts. And several of the chapters offer thoughtful discussions of the difficult methodological and ethical issues involved when studying those who exercise, but are also subject to, state power.