Introduction: the fabrication of persons and things

Tracking Nature Inscribed: Nature in Rights and Bureaucratic Practice

“…Although there is a larger community of ANT-inspired anthropologists out there with an interest in documents and bureaucratic procedures -for instance Strathern (2000), Riles (2006), Pottage and Mundy (2004) -, this topic is often claimed to be dry material and not as appealing as other kinds of anthropology. Furthermore, bureaucratic practice is also difficult to translate from one language to another.…”

The Cultural Logics of Illegality: Living Outside the Law in the Mongolian Gold Mines

“…Although the formal distinctions between legal and illegal activities cannot simply be presumed to be relevant to people's individual moral evaluations of present practices, laws articulate general distinctions that emerge from their dialectic with society. As noted by Pottage (2004), state laws do not exist above or beyond society, without any reference to or dialogue with the ways in which people go about their lives. Rather, state laws are cultural artefacts that tell us about legal as well as popular conceptions of the moral matrix of life.…”

Power and Contingency in Planning

“…The idea that planners can know, either in advance or during the process, what is good for a community or what is the best procedure to get there is a trace (in the Lacanian sense o f a stain) o f a modernist configuration o f power. A configuration whereby planners silently take the role o f the king, the position that enables overview, a unified perspective that can define the place o f everything (Luhmann, 1990;Pottage, 2004;Scott, 1998). The stress on contingency in no way diminishes the potential power o f planning.…”