A Future History of Water: An Interview with Andrea Ballestero
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…
Tag: #bureaucracy
#Open Call: Allegra Lab / EASA LawNet webinar series in honour of Sally Engle Merry
This series of online, public seminars features presentations that examine the current state of legal anthropology. We welcome contributions from anthropologists working on ‘the law’ in the broad…
#Failures: Failed to belong – (Re)Negotiations of care in a Tanzanian social welfare office
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…
#Reviews: Dispossessed
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…
Call for reviews: Law, technology, Bureaucracy
Our new Book Review Team has expanded with the arrival of Emilie Thévenoz (Thank you Emilie for joining us!), which means we are now able to publish more…
The Knot of Ecological Time: An Outlet, an Election, and an Irrigation Office
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.…
Vijayanka Nair takes the page 99 test
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…
#Review: Rules, Paper and Status
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…
Informed Consent Statement for Readers of This Column
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…
Post-Bureaucratic Stress: Reflections on getting a police check in Vietnam
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…
Bringing anthropologies of the state to Mainz: A workshop report
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…
Book Review: When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency by Bernardo Zacka
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…
Current Trends in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy – A Report
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…
Plumbing the Depths in Lahore
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…
Blue binders of white donors: sorting race out in South African IVF by Tessa Moll
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…
REDUX: “Cleaning Up the Streets” #AnthroState
Hillbrow, Johannesburg: It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow…
Revisiting ‘States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies’
‘States at Work’ aims to contribute to the academic debates on processes of state-building in Africa, and, among development practitioners, on the role of the state in development,…
First (Virtual) Meeting on Meeting (MoM) #bureaucracy
This summer, Allegra has been particularly inspired by the intricacies of global bureaucracies. Our readers may have already read the report of the workshop ‘The Bureaucratization of Utopia̵…
Second (Virtual) Meeting on Meeting (MoM) #bureaucracy
This is part two of our virtual Meeting on Meeting. Read the Minute of our First MoM here. Date: 12 July 2017 Chair: Julie Billaud (JB), Director of…
The Bureaucratization of Utopia – A Report
Our students do not dream of global change anymore! It is on these pessimistic words that Alessandro Monsutti opened our workshop « The Bureaucratization of Utopia: International Governance, Audit…
The Bureaucratization of Utopia – The video!
“The Bureaucratization of Utopia: International Governance, Audit Cultures and Administrative subjectivities in the 21st Century” was a workshop organized at the Graduate Institute in Ge…
On Extroverted Expertise, One-Handed Scientists & Dirty Laundry #REDUX
In 2014, Vincent Ialenti wrote about deflated optimisms among European scientists grappling with political questions about their legitimacy, the capitalization of their expertise, and the frustrations…
Building Out the Rat: Animal Intimacies and Prophylactic Settlement in 1920s South Africa
by Branwyn Polykett, University of Cambridge § In the years between the two world wars another global war was declared, the war on the rat. The rat was a stray…
#REVIEW: PAPER TIGER: LAW, BUREAUCRACY AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE IN HIMALAYAN INDIA
Nayanika Mathur’s Paper Tiger. Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India is an ethnography of the everyday life of law and bureaucracy. It reveals the complexity of…