Bureaucracy

The term "bureaucracy" refers broadly to administration and official procedure in states, corporations, and other complex organizations. However, the term has a much more complicated set of connotations related to delays and overwrought procedural protocols, emanating from critiques of socialism, the state, and modernity. The figure of the bureaucrat stands at the center of discourse about bureaucracy: at once listless and nefarious, the bureaucrat embodies the inscrutability and absurdity of modern institutional power: impersonal, ubiquitous, and charged with executing law and regulation dispassionately. Bureaucracy represents an ideal of state-enforced equality before the law that is in endless deferral. Anthropologists are well placed to sort through these contradictions and how they manifest in the everyday life of clients, bureaucrats, and others who engage with bureaucracy. The study of bureaucracy has a shallow scholarly history in the discipline of anthropology relative to sociology and political science. For much of the 20th century, bureaucracy was seen as strictly a “Western” phenomenon and therefore outside the purview of anthropologists, who tended to focus on “non-Western” phenomena in other parts of the world. This disciplinary territoriality began to shift in the mid-1990s, and anthropologists increasingly turned an eye toward the everyday life of organizations, including the documents, protocols, and forms of sociality that configure it. This shift was a result of several intellectual currents, notably anthropologists’ interest in understanding how the lives of the subaltern peoples they study are shaped by political institutions and projects. These include the state—a crucial site for the development of the anthropology of bureaucracy—but also humanitarian aid organizations and environmental conservation programs. As anthropologists began asking questions about bureaucrats as ethnographic subjects rather than merely executors of official policy, a greater sensibility for the signs and affective qualities of bureaucratic life opened up new insights into the diversity of positions within bureaucratic institutions, as well as the many kinds of bureaucratic work subsumed under the category of “bureaucracy.” Anthropologists of bureaucracy today train their focus on research funding committees, meetings in corporate board rooms, the aesthetic form of paperwork stamped by civil servants at municipal planning offices, the protocols of environmental impact assessments, interactions between asylum applicants and immigration officials, and beyond.