Title
Introduction: Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State in Everyday Life
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2011
Abstract
Government has become a central character in anthropological studies, but anthropologists rarely investigate how government itself operates. Instead, it appears as a looming shadow that mysteriously affects its surroundings. My portion of this introduction to a symposium on state bureaucracy recasts government administration as a site for ethnographic study — a place with an everyday life of its own. It asks scholars to move beyond the political philosopher’s view of bureaucracies as bleak, bland, lifeless assemblies of cogs. It also urges rejecting the image of unaccountable, intractable, unknowable morass that bureaucracies seeking to insulate themselves from probing project.
Publication Title
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
First Page
6
Last Page
10
Recommended Citation
Anya Bernstein & Elizabeth Mertz, Introduction: Bureaucracy: Ethnography of the State in Everyday Life, PoLAR, May 2011, at 6.