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…
Tag: #bureaucracy
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…
On Chinese Pedagogical Legalism (and its Anthropological Ghost) #fictions
“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…
An “Ecological Path” in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park: On the Reflexivity of Oil Infrastructure
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…
The Deportation Conundrum – REDUX #BORDERS
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…
#Review: States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies
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…
#Review: The Gloss of Harmony. The Politics of Policy-Making in Multilateral Organisations
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…
The No-Person
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…