The Bureaucrat’s Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy

Hayat, Maira

doi:10.1111/awr.12207

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…14. See the important work by von ; ; Folch (2019); Ballestero (2019b); ; Andersen (2016); Hayat (2020); and Barnes (2015). 15.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Hammond

2023

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Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.orgThe Fluvial Imagination CRITICAL ENVIRONMESERNTS: NATURE, SCIENCE, AND POLITICS Edited by Julie Guthman and Rebecca LaveThe Critical Environments series publishes books that explore the political forms of life and the ecologies that emerge from histories of capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and more.Map 3. Map of the Union of South Africa circa 1975, showing the Bantustans. Note that not all Bantustans had been granted "independence" at that time. Dotted line shows the "conquered territories" of Lesotho. Cartography by Jon Caris and Tracy Tien, Spatial Analysis Lab at Smith College. Bantustan boundaries adapted by author from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w /index.php?curid=25392438 by Htonl. Conquered territories boundary digitized by author based on map in Lelimo (1998). Ocean bathymetry made with Natural Earth. All other administrative boundaries and city locations from ESRI Living Atlas. social activity: of imagination, of production, of reproduction. 40Above all, engineering storage requires regular reckoning with contradiction, namely the contradiction between storage and extraction. During apartheid, South Africa sought to store up workers it could tap at any moment. Industry then wanted laborers but not rights-bearing citizens. It needed them close, but wanted them far away. Industry today wants Lesotho's water, but without having to worry about the landscapes from which it issues. It demands minimal impact by livestock, but as I'll show it provides almost no long-term employment, leaving livestock production as one of the few options for rural people living in upstream catchments. South Africa's labor reserves required "upstream" mechanisms to manage their contradictions. 41 Some of these mechanisms were material in nature, while others were symbolic or social. Borders and passbooks, for example, helped regulate the flow of people, while ethnic or national identities helped to justify that regulation. The disciplining of kinship relations, too, for example by prohibiting spouses and children to accompany mineworkers, reinforced miners' status as "temporary sojourners" in white areas. 42 South Africa's water reserve requires similar upstream mechanisms. As during its labor-reserve era, the demands of storage and extraction in this reimagined apartheid infrastructure come into conflict. The contradictions generated by Lesotho's structural position as water reservoir must be managed. Over my sixteen months of ethnographic and ecological field research between 2011 and 2019, 43 I found that such management is in large part an exercise in theorizing environmental proce...

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“…14. See the important work by von ; ; Folch (2019); Ballestero (2019b); ; Andersen (2016); Hayat (2020); and Barnes (2015). 15.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As the literature on the everyday life of the state has shown, state bureaucrats are not cardboard cut-outs. See Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan (2014); Hull (2012); Chalfin (2010); Hayat (2020); Hoag (2011);and Anders (2010). My intention is not to disparage them righteously by linking their work to imperial projects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Hammond

2023

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Section: A Minor History Of the Lower Bari Doabmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, despite attending to the unintended consequences of realizing the project of the state, the focus remains on the state as the agent of history. Within these large-scale analyses, the subaltern histories of the people and place fail to figure prominently as well as the cultural and symbolic politics that determine the relations between the people and state at the local level (Aijaz, 2018;Aijaz and Akhter, 2020;Hayat, 2019Hayat, , 2020. Mubbashir Rizvi's (2017 analysis of the Anjuman Muzareen (tenants associations) Punjab makes a case for ethnographic archiving of the symbolic politics that governs the material and affective exchanges between the people and the state in the canal colonies.…”

Section: A Minor History Of the Lower Bari Doabmentioning

confidence: 99%

State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab

Aijaz

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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The progressive materialization of the modern state and capitalist agrarian production in the interfluvial uplands of Punjab was enabled by colonial ideologies of control over nature as progress. The colonial project of the transformation of the people and place in Punjab was built upon the imperial aesthetics of waste that imagined the local landscape as hideous and pastoral communities as “semi-barbarous.” These imaginaries justified the colonial project of technological control over nature through installation of hydraulic infrastructure and the political control of native communities as investments in cultivation and culture. These statist narratives of progress are built upon an elision of the voices of subaltern communities and their interactions with the modern state. Based on my ethnographic and archival works on pastoral Baloch tribes of the Lower Bari Doab region of Punjab, I argue that a different history emerges if traced from the perspective of the communities located on the margins of this hydrosocial assemblage. This is a minor history that does not privilege state as the protagonist of progress rather traces the stories of survival in the face of eco-scarcity. As the current environmental crisis accentuates the inherent instabilities of the hydrosocial assemblage in the canal colonies, it also reveals limitation of the narratives of control over nature as progress. In a world threatened by the anthropogenic climate crisis, the possibilities of a better future might emerge in curating the stories of survival against the histories of control.

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“…Civil bureaucracy in Pakistan is notorious for its cumbersome procedures and rampant corruption (Nelson 2008). This is particularly true for the office of the patwari , which has become a metaphor for corruption in Pakistan (Hayat 2020). The complexity of the land management system, and specifically the opacity of the revenue bureaucracy, limits access for those who do not have the knowledge, wealth, and social capital required to effectively navigate legal and bureaucratic spaces (Ahmad 2017).…”

Section: Urbanization Histories and Local Conceptions Of Landownershipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing dispossessed and humanitarian subjects: Land acquisition and compensation policies in Lahore, Pakistan

Tassadiq

2022

PoLAR

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This article examines land acquisition for the construction of a metro train line in Lahore, Pakistan, to argue that the role and temporality of bureaucratic documentary practices are key to enabling urban informality and associated regimes of substantive citizenship. I examine the changing role of bureaucratic documents along the axes of (a) state and citizens, as documents are transferred between various actors who attribute different meanings to them; and (b) time, as documents assume varying meanings across their life cycles. First, I argue that documents constitute the disaggregated state and facilitate inconsistent practices that produce urban informality by exempting such settlements from some regulations while subjecting them to others. Second, a study of the time effects of these contingent practices and associated documentation shows that while original settlers may manipulate the disparate institutions of the state to secure resources, tolerance of such settlements across generations prompts a reformulation of local conceptions of landownership. Contemporary residents, then, position themselves as propertied citizens in possession of ownership documents. In this case of land acquisition, such efforts secured limited recognition from the state: residents were cast as illegal encroachers but were eventually offered some compensation as humanitarian aid, thereby reproducing socioeconomic inequalities. [bureaucratic documents, urban informality, state, temporality, citizenship]

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The Bureaucrat’s Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy

Cited by 5 publications

References 20 publications

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

State, scarcity, and survival: A minor history of people and place in the Lower Bari Doab, Punjab

Producing dispossessed and humanitarian subjects: Land acquisition and compensation policies in Lahore, Pakistan

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