The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy

Hull, Matthew S.

doi:10.1016/s0271-5309(03)00019-3

Cited by 322 publications

(140 citation statements)

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“…A similar argument has been made, following Max Weber, with regard to written documents as technologies of bureaucracy [Hull 2003]. April 5, 1912.…”

mentioning

confidence: 60%

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Rizzo

2013

Visual Anthropology

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This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th-and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body-physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground. Police photography as discursive practiceTime and again police photography captivates the social imaginary. Images of surveillance seem to provide a tangible sense of what Jean and John Comaroff [2004] have referred to as the metaphysics of disorder, the intense preoccupation with crime and, concurrently, the state's means of restoring public order and society's ability to explain the roots and causes of social deviance. The past decades saw innumerable mug-shots and photos of crime scenes escaping the closure and secrecy of barred filing cabinets at police stations and entering a variety of new discursive spaces-among them the internet, the museum

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“…A similar argument has been made, following Max Weber, with regard to written documents as technologies of bureaucracy [Hull 2003]. April 5, 1912.…”

mentioning

confidence: 60%

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Rizzo

2013

Visual Anthropology

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“…Gupta (2012, p. 23, tradução nossa), no seu estudo do "red tape" de políticas sociais na Índia, reitera o enorme poder dos processos administrativos: "[…] não importa quão nobres as intenções dos programas, não importa quão sinceros os técnicos carregados de realizá-los, o objetivo explícito de ajudar os pobres é subvertido pelos próprios procedimentos da burocracia". Contudo, tal como Hull (2003) debruçado sobre documentos burocráticos no Afeganistão, Gupta procura dar visibilidade aos elos "mediadores" da administração que, longe de seguir mecanicamente esquemas top-down de disciplinamento e controle, se revelam como artefatos com consequências nem sempre previsíveis.…”

Section: Burocracias: Mediações E Intermediáriosunclassified

“…Ao vencer os diversos obstáculos burocráticos para se inscrever no Cadastro Único e ter acesso aos benefícios sociais, as pessoas entram nas estatísticas que garantem a "legibilidade" da população. Ao mesmo tempo, esses artefatos gráfi cos contribuem para a construção ritual da autoridade de agentes individuais e coletivos do Estado (Hull, 2003). Mas, nesse processo, o que mais se destaca na descrição etnográfi ca é a fl exibilidade do sistema assegurada pela ousadia dos funcionários federais e locais empenhados em levar não só benefícios, mas também moralidades de cidadania para o interior do país.…”

Section: Burocracias: Mediações E Intermediáriosunclassified

Apresentação

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Tecnologias de governo: apreciação e releituras em antropologia[Damiens fora condenado, a 2 de março de 1757], a pedir perdão publicamente diante da porta principal da Igreja de Paris, aonde devia ser levado e acompanhado numa carroça, nu, de camisola, carregando uma tocha de cera acesa de duas libras; em seguida, na dita carroça, na praça de Grè ve, e sobre um patíbulo que aí será́ erguido, atenazado nos mamilos, braços, coxas e barrigas das pernas, sua mão direita segurando a faca com que cometeu o dito parricí dio, queimada com fogo de enxofre, e às partes em que será́ atenazado se aplicarão chumbo derretido, óleo fervente, piche em fogo, cera e enxofre derretidos conjuntamente, e a seguir seu corpo será́ puxado e desmembrado por quatro cavalos e seus membros e corpo consumidos ao fogo, reduzidos a cinzas, e suas cinzas lançadas ao vento. Finalmente foi esquartejado [relata a Gazette d'Amsterdam]. Essa ultima operação foi muito longa, porque os cavalos utilizados não estavam afeitos à tração; de modo que, em vez de quatro, foi preciso colocar seis; e como isso não bastasse, foi necessário, para desmembrar as coxas do infeliz, cortar-lhe os nervos e retalhar-lhe as juntas. (Foucault, 1987, p. 9

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“…All citizens should receive the same advice and rulings regardless of which regional tax office they direct their enquiries to (i.e., Ekman, 2003: 80). For examiners, the documents protect them from being singled out as individual decision makers (Hull, 2003) and provide a library of references when correcting tax returns.…”

Section: Ethnography Of Public Documents At the Swedish Tax Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Common sense at the Swedish Tax Agency: Transactional boundaries that separate taxable and tax-free income

Larsen

2015

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

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The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy

Cited by 322 publications

References 3 publications

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South-West Africa

Apresentação

Common sense at the Swedish Tax Agency: Transactional boundaries that separate taxable and tax-free income

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