Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

We write this editorial in June 2024, in the middle of an intense period of exam marking at Cambridge—and a moment of soul-searching for universities. In recent months, educational institutions across the world have scrambled to respond to the new challenges posed by ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. At the heart of these efforts is an age-old dilemma: how do we know this is really the student's work? How do we know they aren't just faking it? But such initial attempts to suppress exam fraud open up further questions: do timed, closed-book exams genuinely reflect what students have learned, or are they a poor proxy for the real thing? Are there better ways of engaging with artificial intelligence than simply demonising it as a fake essay mill? What are the potential knock-on effects of emerging measures to mitigate exam fraud?

The fake is a sign of our times. Yet while there are a lot of fakes out there, they are not just there for the finding. We are aware of fakes because they are called out, or, in other words, policed. This observation points to how the relationship between policing and fakes is normalised. Within it there are two assumptions at play: the fake is self-evidently problematic, and police are natural enforcers in the fight against that problem. Using the tools of ethnography, we seek to unsettle both assumptions. We argue the following: (1) the meticulous labour of policing is required to make fakes real; (2) policing itself creates insecurity for which the declaration of fakeness offers resolution; and (3) when we look at how police themselves create and extract value through fakes, we find that there are as many forms of policing as there are of fakes.

Police across the world are increasingly asked to join the fight against fakes that a large and robust global web of intellectual property (IP) regulations has established. But how do already over-stretched police come to believe in this fight and devote scarce resources to it? To answer this, I examine the peculiar space of the IP conference, and the force of persuasion it delivers. Conferences matter because they transform abstract IP policy into pressing priority. In the space of the conference, officers are drawn into carefully scripted narratives of counterfeiting-as-crime and come to experience viscerally the dangers fakes reportedly pose. Through a careful reading of conference proceedings alongside fieldwork at IP conferences, I show how conferences banish the doubts of police and deliver persuasive force.

Spurious drug bust photojournalism in India is dominated by a few types of images, repeated so regularly as to constitute their own visual trope. Given that hard evidence for fake drugs is notoriously hard to find, I ask: how does spurious drug bust photojournalism perform the truth of the fake? Using the interpretive tools of visual culture to explore the charge these images come to hold, I argue that spurious drug bust photojournalism invites its reader to see two rare things: (1) an unambiguous heroics of the Indian police, and (2) a reality of fake pharmaceuticals in India.

In Poland almost all abortions are illegal and unavailable in the formal medical system. Networks of activists help people obtain abortion pills for secret use. I conducted research among medication abortion activists, abortion providers, abortion pill vendors, and abortion advocates in Poland and abroad, about anxieties that adhere to these pills. I learned that though activists source and provide the same pills used in settings where abortion is legal, pills in Poland's clandestine settings are mired as much in worries about fakeness as about prosecution. I make sense of this by showing how worries about fake pills in Poland speak less to the pharmaceutical properties of medicines than to the political, moral, legal, and geographical boundaries they cross as they circulate.

Rumours about fake or harmful vaccines came sharply into view during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such rumours are widely dismissed as misinformation. Based on ethnographic research in Mombasa, Kenya, I argue vaccine rumours are better understood as sources of information, which emerge from and express discontent about discriminatory patterns of policing in the name of health. Through vaccine rumours that, in Mombasa, took the form of claims about fake vaccines, urban residents expressed contempt for the over-policing they are subjected to as Muslims and as Africans, and frustration with the under-policing of capital and corporations. Claims about fake vaccines mobilised a new, often fantastic, discursive mode that reveals the highly unequal nature of health policing and regulation.

Sex enhancers have a special place in the policing of fake drugs. Warnings against fake Viagra, for instance, pepper public health announcements and policy documents. In line with this global concern, in 2013, Zimbabwe banned over-the-counter sales of sex enhancers. In a context of severe economic crisis, a street trade in sex enhancers nonetheless continued. Here I explore this street-level trade and the forms of policing that have emerged around the ban: among traders, among the public, and among the police themselves. I argue that Zimbabwe's attempts to constrain the circulation of fakes created a productive market where various players stepped into policing both the ban as well as this newly illegal trade and profited by doing so.

Rio de Janeiro is notorious for police excess. Police are seen to operate beyond the law, garnering prestige and resources in the process. Yet this does not sully the status or desirability of the profession. Policing is a sought-after occupation, and many who apply for it cannot join. I examine one subset of these would-be officers, called pi-lícias, who make incursions into policing by impersonating officials. In contrast to the common view that impersonation threatens police authority, I show that pi-lícias extend the range of official policing and amplify its power. Taking fakeness as a force in itself, I argue that pi-lícias, precisely by lacking officialdom, allow for the thriving of extra-judicial powers on which the authority of the city's police is grounded.

A border wall. An aid bunker. An Oxford garden. Amid wars and pandemics, the global security landscape is proliferating from the militarised red zones at capitalism's margins right into its beating heart. What kind of human future awaits once security becomes the default solution to perennial crisis? I suggest that both demand for security and supply of security capabilities are escalating—and that the resulting ‘securitisation of everything’ is fast outrunning our ability to analyse, let alone control, it. A large part of this runaway change concerns how security is appropriating and colonising intimate human life while making ordinary people complicit in its operations. Anthropology, that compromised trickster-science of the human, has an important role to play in understanding and perhaps subverting this monstrous reality.

Michele Ilana Friedner, Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

Erin Raffety, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022.

Arseli Dokumacı, Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds, Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.

Charlotte Al-Khalili, Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity, London: UCL Press, 2023.