David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy
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.…
Tag: #bureaucracy
Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
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…
#A future history of water: Andrea Ballestero’s response
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…
The only lesson is that there aren’t enough jobs
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…
Mediating Mobility: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State
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…
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…
#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
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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…