Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction Jonathan Xavier Inda This book is intended as a reflection on the question of modernity. It has two general orientations. One is anthropological. What this means, simply put for now, is three things. First, it means that the essays gathered here treat modernity not in abstract terms but tangibly as an ethnographic object. Their aim, in other words, is not to come up with some grand, general account of modernity but to analyze its concrete manifestations. Second, it means that these essays examine the materialization of the modern not just in the West, as tends to be the case in most disciplines, but worldwide. Indeed, the bent of the volume is determinedly global, its empirical sites ranging from Italy and Ukraine to India, Brazil, and French Guiana. Finally, to be anthropological in orientation means that at the stake in the analysis of modernity is the value and form of the anthropos or human being (Collier and Ong 2003; Rabinow 2003). Said otherwise, the book is centrally concerned with the modern constitution of the social and biological life of the human. The other orientation of the book is Foucauldian. This means that the intel- lectual point of departure for the essays in the volume is the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Particularly central to these analyses of modernity are Foucault’s (2000) reflections on modern government. In these reflections, the term ‘‘government’’ generally refers to the conduct of conduct – that is, to all those more or less calculated and systematic ways of thinking and acting that aim to shape, regulate, or manage the comportment of others, whether these be workers in a factory, inmates in a prison, wards in a mental hospital, the inhab- itants of a territory, or the members of a population. Understood this way, ‘‘government’’ designates not just the activities of the state and its institutions but more broadly any rational effort to influence or guide the conduct of human beings through acting upon their hopes, desires, circumstances, or environment. Sketched out in these reflections is thus a particular approach to analyzing modern political power – one that treats the state as only one element, albeit a rather important one, in a multiple network of actors, organizations, and entities 1