Documents and Bureaucracy Hull, Matthew S
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2012, Letnik:
41, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic ...organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.
This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and ...displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.
In inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, criminal "dons" have taken on a range of governmental functions. While such criminal actors have sometimes been imagined as heading "parallel ...states," I argue that they are part of a hybrid state, an emergent political formation in which multiple governmental actors—in this case, criminal organizations, politicians, police, and bureaucrats—are entangled in a relationship of collusion and divestment, sharing control over urban spaces and populations. Extending recent scholarship on variegated sovereignty and neoliberal shifts in governance, I consider the implications of this diversification of governmental actors for the ways that citizenship is experienced and enacted. The hybrid state both produces and relies on distinct political subjectivities. It is accompanied by a reconfigured, hybrid citizenship, in which multiple practices and narratives related to rule and belonging, to rights and responsibilities, are negotiated by a range of actors.
Sovereignty Revisited Hansen, Thomas Blom; Stepputat, Finn
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2006, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central ...proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty-modern and premodern-are developed. We argue that although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority. The last section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.
In this article, I draw from fieldwork on the micropractices of hawkers' illicit dealings with low-level state functionaries in Mumbai, India, to explore how claims to city space are negotiated. I ...argue that what is often understood as a breakdown in urban governance is, instead, what I call an "ordinary space of negotiation" that constitutes the grounds on which claims to substantive citizenship are made. This ethnographic exploration of what practices of corruption produce has the possibility to expand how scholars think about the state and political claim making in liberal democratic contexts at large.
In this paper I will argue that the development of an analytical perspective that considers the production of neoliberalism 'at a global scale' -- as suggests Wacquant in this volume -- must take ...into account the trajectories of a variety of states. In order to identify both similarities and differences in neoliberal implementation, I will discuss three theses developed by Wacquant in this debate section of Social Anthropology, which aim to sustain a historical anthropology of neoliberalism: (i) neoliberalism is a political project that entails the reengineering of the state; (ii) neoliberalism entails a rightward tilting of the bureaucratic field and gives rise to a Centaur-state; (iii) the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state is an integral component of the neoliberal state. To facilitate the discussion, I propose, as others have done, a distinction between theoretical and practical neoliberalism (Harvey 2007; Ferguson 2010; Harrison 2010). Theoretical neoliberalism is a body of literature mostly generated by economists. Practical neoliberalism includes (a) reforms or actions taken in the name of neoliberalism or based on its assumptions, of which the quintessential expression is the Washington consensus and (b) the embodiment of a principle of competition and maximisation in the categories of perception and practice of social agents and institutions. I will briefly consider the body of theoretical literature to show that the state has often been considered an essential component of neoliberal transformation. After that I will describe the application of this theory in Africa. However, there is never a perfect correspondence between theory and practice. Even if a theory has universal ambitions, implementations or effects of theory always happen in a reality with its own historical, social and economic configuration. Whereas some authors present neoliberalism as the decay of an inflexible state or as the inexorable advance of its right hand, it appears that neoliberal impact can never be understood in radical separation from historical configurations and has to be evaluated differently depending on context. I hope to move beyond a Western-centred view of neoliberal expansion in order to show that considering the 'historicity of the state' (Bayart 1996) from a comparative perspective is necessary to understand neoliberal implementation and its variations. Adapted from the source document.
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national ...territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: verticality (the state is "above" society) and encompassment (the state "encompasses" its localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of grasping how new practices of government and new forms of "grassroots" politics may call into question the principles of verticality and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states' authority over "the local."
Is China Becoming Neoliberal? Nonini, Donald M.
Critique of anthropology,
06/2008, Letnik:
28, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic ...liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming `neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in ...aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and of justifying and actualizing gendarmes' self-perception as intellectuals in uniform. Bureaucratic work, I argue, is always also aesthetic work, and bureaucratic aesthetics is where aesthetic, pragmatic, and legal reasonings become one.
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