Postcolonial bureaucracies: power and public administration in ‘most of the world’

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Edward W Said, Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition with a New Preface, New York: Vintage, 2004, pp 3–5. For a telling illustration, see Georg Steinmetz, The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingado, Samoa and Southwest Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp 391–426, 462. 2 Walter D Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, p 36, original emphasis. 3 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H H Gerth and C Wright Mills (eds), with a new preface by Bryan S Turner, New York, Routledge, 2009, p 245. 4 The fact that the everyday practices of Western bureaucracies hardly resemble the typical Weberian image is largely ignored in this debate. On this point, see the classic study by Michael Lipsky, Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980. 5 Robert Rotberg, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p 7. 6 See Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004; Thomas Blom-Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postclonial State, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2001; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind’, Current Anthropology 42(1), 2001, pp 125–138; 7 Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz, ‘Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State in Everyday Life’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(1), 2011, p 6. But see Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008; Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa, London: Zed Books, 2006, as well as the special issue of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 34(1), 2011, on ‘Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State in Everyday Life’, edited by Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz, for important exceptions. 8 Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 9 Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, p 4. 10 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6(3), 1969, pp 167–191. 11 Gupta, Red Tape, pp 5–6. 12 Gupta, Red Tape, p 24. 13 Gerhard Andres and Monique Nuijten, ‘Corruption and the Secret of Law: An Introduction’, in Gerhard Andres and Monique Nuijten (eds), Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, Farnham: Ashgate, 2007, pp 3–4. 14 Gupta, Red Tape, p 81. 15 Monique Nuijten, Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organisation, London: Pluto Press, 2003. 16 Gupta, Red Tape, pp 109–110. 17 Gupta, Red Tape, p 122. 18 Gupta, Red Tape, p 141. 19 Gupta, Red Tape, p 147. 20 Gupta, Red Tape, p 187. 21 Gupta, Red Tape, p 272. 22 Matthew S Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. 23 On Actor-Network Theory, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 24 Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, in Deborah J Johnson and Jameson M Wetmore (eds), Technology and Society, Building Our Sociotechnical Future, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, p 152. 25 Hull, Government of Paper, p 27. 26 Hull, Government of Paper, p 66. 27 Hull, Government of Paper, p 108. 28 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed. 29 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, p 60. 30 Hull, Government of Paper, p 187. 31 Hull, Government of Paper, p 256. 32 Bruno Latour, ‘The Powers of Association’, in John Law (ed), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, 1986, pp 264–280. 33 Hull, Government of Paper, p 256. 34 Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 35 Javier Auyero, Poor People's Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000; Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests and the Quest for Recognition, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Javier Auyero and Débora Swistum, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 36 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 2, original emphasis. 37 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 4. 38 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 9, original emphasis. 39 Susan C Stokes, ‘Political Clientelism’, in Carles Boix and Susan C Stokes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p 667. 40 On these issues, see Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks and Public Security, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Tina Hilgers (ed), Clientelism in Everyday Latin American Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds), Fractured Cities: Social Exclusion, Urban Violence and Contested Spaces in Latin America, London: Zed Books, 2007. 41 See also his related analysis of what he calls the ‘gray zone of state power’ in Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp 31–51. 42 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 74. 43 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 135. 44 Auyero, Patients of the State, p 156, original emphasis.