Tag: #bureaucracyPage 1 of 2
Špela Drnovšek Zorko , June 3rd, 2022
any day or part day that the individual sees their child in person in the UK counts as a day on which they see their child in the…
Kirsty Howey , March 22nd, 2022
What if the greatest legacy of uranium mining is not its localized radioactive toxicity, but the seemingly mundane set of bureaucratic practices it catalysed? In this post, I…
focaal_admin , March 4th, 2022
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to…
focaal_admin , February 9th, 2022
David Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling – set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he…
focaal_admin , February 9th, 2022
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussant: Michael Herzfeld If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy….
focaal_admin , October 19th, 2021
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…
Andrea Ballestero , October 10th, 2021
When encountering the generosity of brilliant colleagues, one can only start with gratitude. Add to that a historical moment when a virus has reconfigured the languages, spaces, and…
Daniel Souleles , October 8th, 2021
Every so often something happens that perfectly encapsulates the consumptive death rattle that is the job market in higher education. A few weeks ago, the department of anthropology…
Natasha Raheja , May 17th, 2021
Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) will present on ‘Mediating mobility: Migration and brokerage at the borders of the State’. Elizabeth Challinor (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) will ac…

colinhoag , October 13th, 2020
A Future History of Water By Andrea Ballestero, Rice University 248pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke with Prof. Andrea Ballestero about her recent book…
Nina Haberland , September 30th, 2020
Every day, women, men, and children sit on the wonky wooden benches in front of the social welfare office, patiently waiting to present their matters to one of…

Sophie Andreetta , May 27th, 2020
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Dispossessed considers the 2008 subprime crisis through the eyes of Sacramento homeowners and the daily work of bank officers tasked to…

colinhoag , November 12th, 2019
By Maira Hayat, Stanford University § In 2015, local elections were held in Pakistan, ten years after the previous ones in 2005 during General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule….
| , September 30th, 2019
My dissertation is an ethnographic study of India’s Aadhaar (foundation) program, a colossal technocratic project that seeks to redefine how the Indian state (over)sees its population. Under the…
Veronica Ferreri , September 9th, 2019
The arrival of a ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘asylym seeker,’ or the European ‘Other,’ is too familiar to us from political debates. The stage for this spectacle of ‘crisis’ and…
Alexandra Frankel , April 17th, 2019
You have been selected to receive this column because you are a reader of Anthropology News. Take your time to read this statement and ask the editors any…
Jodie-Lee Trembath , September 26th, 2018
Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin etymology of ‘mundane’ is ‘of the…
Konstanze N’Guessan , July 11th, 2018
With #anthrostate, allegralab seems to suggest that there is a distinct subdiscipline of anthropology that studies the contemporary state. However, following Bourdieu (1994), Navaro-Yashin (2002) or m…
Rose Deller , May 15th, 2018
In When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, Bernardo Zacka draws on eight months of fieldwork working as a receptionist in an anti-poverty agency to…
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Chihab El Khachab , April 25th, 2018
The study of bureaucracy has become a standard prerogative of English-language anthropology in recent years. Long gone are the days when bureaucracy was considered the exclusive realm of…
Alexandra Frankel , March 15th, 2018
Waste water inspections open up questions about bureaucratic processes and interactions. In the summer of 2015, the top tiers of the Punjab political and civil administration met in…
Tessa Moll , February 7th, 2018
Miracle babies. The microscopic enchantments of embryos. The image of a woman holding that much-desired infant. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is replete with awe-inducing imagery, often bordering…