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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
‘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,…
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…
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…
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: International Governance, Audit Cultures and Administrative subjectivities in the 21st Century” was a workshop organized at the Graduate Institute in Ge…
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…
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…
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…
“You have already been incredibly faithful towards the man. And you have been following all the relevant rules for establishing a co-operative. Now, what you need to do…
By Peter Taber, Arizona State University § Satellite imagery of a small section of the Block 31 road entering the Apaika platform area, taken in 2013. Imagery courtesy of…
Today we re-visit a post on the deportation conundrum by Barak Kalir. The post was first published in the spring of 2014 as a part of our thread…
Anthropologists have been studying the various phenomena associated with states and ‘state-like’ structures for a long time (cf. Fortes 1940, Leach 1954). It was only in the last…
I spent much of my fieldwork at a department of the UK Government grappling with a confusing dynamic between civil servants I worked with, and their ‘stakeholders’ from…
Over the past few weeks I have been working closely with London’s homeless community for my PhD fieldwork. As part of my role at the day centre where…