Facsimileing the State: The Bureaucracy of Document Transmission in Israeli Human Rights NGOs

Abstract

Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), invites you to submit articles for peer review. We welcome articles in both French and English that engage with any field of sociocultural anthropology, covering a broad range of topics relevant to the dynamics of contemporary life. We welcome articles that are grounded in innovative methodologies, such as visual anthropology, community engaged research, and critical studies of materiality. Submissions should be based on original ethnographic fieldwork in any part of the world.

Helsinki in Zion: Hospital ethics committees and political gatekeeping in Israel/Palestine

“…As these agents do so, ethical values or ideals come to replace politics and serve to reinforce hierarchies of power (Rivkin‐Fish 2005; Sunder Rajan 2017; Ticktin 2012; Willen 2019). Bureaucratic “depoliticizing technologies” (Hoag 2011, 82) are extremely effective in making a political question technical (Ferguson 1994; Grinberg 2018; Scherz 2011) and ideological decisions into formalistic questions of ethical codes (Assor and Goodman 2020).…”

“Objectivity” as a bureaucratic virtue

“…When the staff took objectivity to be a virtue worth pursuing, they transformed the ideal type bureaucracy described by Max Weber (1978) into their own representation of how bureaucracies ought to work (Herzfeld 1992;Hoag 2011). Although anthropologists have not explicitly addressed objectivity as a bureaucratic virtue, many studies noted a similar dynamic concerning qualities ascribed to "objectivity" in different bureaucratic settings and described their implications for bureaucratic organizations (e.g., Albrow 1997;Feldman 2008;Grinberg 2018), their subjects (e.g., Berg et al 2000;Gupta 2012), and society at large (e.g., Ferguson 1990;Herzfeld 1992). While these studies importantly acknowledge that such effects are facilitated by how bureaucrats engage notions of "objectivity" in their every-day work, they scarcely address how this process occurs from the bureaucrats' point of view, or how they attempt to cultivate the virtuous "objective" disposition "in and through social practice," in Cheryl Mattingly's (2012, 164) words.…”

“…When the staff took objectivity to be a virtue worth pursuing, they transformed the ideal type bureaucracy described by Max Weber (1978) into their own representation of how bureaucracies ought to work (Herzfeld 1992; Hoag 2011). Although anthropologists have not explicitly addressed objectivity as a bureaucratic virtue, many studies noted a similar dynamic concerning qualities ascribed to “objectivity” in different bureaucratic settings and described their implications for bureaucratic organizations (e.g., Albrow 1997; Feldman 2008; Grinberg 2018), their subjects (e.g., Berg et al. 2000; Gupta 2012), and society at large (e.g., Ferguson 1990; Herzfeld 1992).…”

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

“…It is not only Palestinians who waste time in dealing with Israeli bureaucracy and spatial control (Peteet 2017), but also HR NGOs (Grinberg 2018). The intended uses of testimony include, as noted, arbitration by the very same tribunals that regulate the occupation.…”