Performing Good Governance: The Aesthetics of Bureaucratic Practice in Malawi

Eggen, Øyvind

doi:10.1080/00141844.2011.580357

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The mechanisms of collecting and redistributing blood could be figured as an in-gathering of citizens, constituting the nation as a biopolitical collective in terms legible to itself and the rest of the world 7 . It did this by sustaining three key connotations of modern ‘stateness’ (see Eggen 2012), which I discuss in the following sections: (1) the overcoming of tribalism; (2) patriotic sacrifice and productivity; and (3) order and medical enlightenment. Each supported Kenyatta's rhetorical ambition to position Kenya, a long-standing ally of Britain and the US, as a reliable partner in the ‘war on terror’ and a member of the ‘international community’ waging that war 8…”

Section: Westgate: Crisis Donation Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Wanner 2013)Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Eggen argues that even seemingly humdrum administrative routines like this have a politically effective aesthetic dimension. As such, they are performative, connoting the justice of a state and its participation in a modernity sanctioned by international powers (Eggen 2012; Mbembe 2001). This was true of the blood donation queues that bodied forth an ideal of fairness in time and space, mixing people of different backgrounds all gathered for a patriotic end (Opalo 2013).…”

Section: ‘What We Want Is Control’: Order and Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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#weareone: blood donation, terrorism and dreams of inclusion in Kenya

Harrington¹

2020

Africa

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This article examines responses to the terrorist attack on the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi in September 2013 in order to investigate the role played by blood donation, as an expression of national dreams, in the political imaginary of contemporary Kenya. It considers the symbolic effectiveness of calls for blood donation made by political figures in the aftermath of the attacks. Such calls drew on a tradition of donation drives begun in the early years of independence, which emphasized the modernizing imperative of the new state and the importance of unity, hard work and self-sacrifice in building the nation. However, the reaction to Westgate, including calls for blood donation, also needs to be understood with reference to the response of American and other leaders to equivalent terrorist attacks in more recent years. These elite dreams found resonance among ordinary citizens and blood donation recruiters. But they were also subjected to trenchant critiques that sought to expose the reality of the transfusion system, as well as the inequality and injustice that mark the general healthcare system and Kenyan society as a whole. These shortcomings were also highlighted by mobilization drives organized by Kenya's Somali and Asian communities both before and during the Westgate crisis. The latter are presented by their organizers as a means of overcoming historic exclusion and discrimination.

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Section: Westgate: Crisis Donation Rhetoricmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘What We Want Is Control’: Order and Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

#weareone: blood donation, terrorism and dreams of inclusion in Kenya

Harrington¹

2020

Africa

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“…The workshops represented governance as an aesthetic expression (Eggen, 2012) in that the act of 'giving sight' (dissemination) took precedence over the sight itself (knowledge). The workshops, as key to the success of LEITI's work, were therefore vehicles for showing LEITI to be 'bringers of light', but the workshops cannot be dismissed merely as aesthetic.…”

Section: Towards An Understanding Of the Meanings And Workings Of Tramentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringers of light: Performing resource revenue transparency in Liberia

Epremian

Brun

2018

Geoforum

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Initiatives designed to increase transparency have become a tool for improving governance and fighting corruption in the natural resource sector. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an international organisation that administers a voluntary standard for natural resource revenue transparency. In line with liberal democratic ideals, EITI aims to empower citizens through the dissemination of information supporting governance improvements, public scrutiny and accountability in the sharing of benefits from resource extraction. Adopting a critical lens to transparency, the article examines EITI's efforts to disseminate natural resource revenue data in rural Liberia. By focusing on how transparency is performed through dissemination workshops, the article creates a nuanced understanding of transparency by analysing how it is operationalised and practiced in encounters with people in areas where resource extraction takes place. The paper begins with an overview of relevant research and the conceptual framing of the study focusing on the performance in and of transparency and continues with a discussion of EITI internationally and in Liberia. Then follows a discussion of the ethnographic approachtravelling with the Liberian EITI-team on their dissemination trip. Through the analysis the article enables an understanding of the workings of transparency by examining how practitioners perform transparency through the performance in the workshops: the structure and orchestration of the workshops; and the performance of transparency by understanding the ways in which the workshops become spectacles that help to legitimise, rationalise and camouflage the fragmented and contradictory realities of extractive industries and their implications for people.

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“…Her work shows that the shared aesthetics of form and design enabled collaboration about international norms and platforms for action on women's rights. The production of information for purposes of governance is not necessarily driven by political convictions about the content and purpose of knowledge (Eggen ; Stirrat ). Rather, matters of form, design, and the presentation of information take precedence over its political uses and stir “collective passions” (Riles :115).…”

Section: Orientationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

ASCERTAINING DEADLY HARMS: Aesthetics and Politics of Global Evidence

Hodžić

2013

Cultural Anthropology

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This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly debates about politics of knowledge in global governance and argues that bringing together insights from aesthetics of governance, science and technology studies, and theories of performativity offers a productive reorientation to existing approaches. My specific question is: how did WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about female genital cutting end up legitimizing them? For anthropologists who participated in the scientific controversy, the answer was clear: the study was driven by ideology. To expand the range of analytical responses, I suggest, we need to understand the rearrangements of knowledge and power in neoliberal governance, as well as a conception of authorship that uncouples scientific statements from sovereign subjects. Deadly harms were not made certain by ideology, I argue, but by aesthetics of expertise, WHO bundling of governance by emergency and governance by evidence, and performative iterations at the cultural boundaries of science. To make this argument, I analyze the historical conditions of possibility for the WHO study, offer an ethnography of knowledge production, and trace the social and governmental lives of fact and meaning‐making. [WHO, female genital cutting, science controversy, governance by evidence, anthropology in the public sphere, aesthetics, performativity]

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Performing Good Governance: The Aesthetics of Bureaucratic Practice in Malawi

Cited by 18 publications

References 17 publications

#weareone: blood donation, terrorism and dreams of inclusion in Kenya

#weareone: blood donation, terrorism and dreams of inclusion in Kenya

Bringers of light: Performing resource revenue transparency in Liberia

ASCERTAINING DEADLY HARMS: Aesthetics and Politics of Global Evidence

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