The Magic of the Populace: An Ethnography of Illegibility in the South African Immigration Bureaucracy

Abstract

Recent anthropological accounts of the state have demonstrated the potential for danger or illegibility in the public's encounter with the state. Much of this work has taken the perspective of the public, however, and less has been said about how functionaries of the state perceive their interactions with the public. This perspectival bias needs to be overcome through ethnographies of the state and of state bureaucracies in everyday practice. This article examines the Immigration Services Branch of the South African Department of Home Affairs, a state bureaucracy widely deemed “illegible” by South Africans and non‐South Africans alike. It documents some of the factors that inform the actions of street‐level bureaucrats, illustrating how bureaucrats develop systems of meaning to help them mitigate the challenges posed by an unpredictable populace and management hierarchy. These systems serve to stabilize these two unstable entities, but they also enable officials to act in ways that might run counter to official discourse while simultaneously upholding its legitimacy. Their stabilization efforts therefore incite a destabilization of the state, leading it to appear as “magical” or “illegible” to the public.

Introduction

“…Nonrecording can represent "implementation gaps" that are caused by, fi rst, the national interest of states, for example, in irregularizing their labor force (Anderson 2010;De Genova 2002;Kalir 2010); second, the selfinterest of state agents (Hoag 2010;Kalir and Sur 2012); third, the subversive or proactive strategies of to-be-recorded subjects (Nyers 2003); fourth, the spatial diff erentiation in states' recording capabilities (Ferguson and Gupta 2002;Van Schendel and Abraham 2005); or, fi ft h, the disaggregated character of governing power within and beyond the state (Li 2010).…”

Hyenas of the Limpopo: The Social Politics of Undocumented Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

“…This form of engagement with both the power and magic of the state (Das, 2004), what others (Hoag, 2010) have termed the magic of the populace, takes on both this ambivalence to bureaucracies, and creative responses to state mechanisms of regulating people at the level of identity (often with a possibility for personal gain) (Mountz, Wright, Miyares, & Bailey, 2002). These positionalities regarding general attitudes towards border enforcement result in what I shortly discuss as illegibility.…”

“…I extend this understanding, and mobilise Colin Hoag's (2010) understanding of the populace as also capable of infusing such unpredictability to the workings of the state. I suggest that the interaction and possible synthesis between the two represent the kind of mutual illegibility that characterises border practices.…”

“…Here, facilitation (often involving third parties such as omalayitsha, but otherwise taking the form of simple negotiation as in Mkhize's case) must come in where otherwise generally silent rituals of stamping and validating passports and other documents would suffice. As a creative act, facilitation proceeds within what Colin Hoag (2010) has termed the magic of the populace. Here, state officials may or may not attempt to stabilise a 'chaotic' environment in which they work, but they often find themselves having to respond to, and hence participate in negotiation with, intermediaries on behalf of undocumented people and goods.…”

“…It focuses on, among other things, what I will refer to as the magical (illegible) qualities of the state border (Das, 2004;Hoag, 2010), the 'personalization of the public' (Medard, 1982), and the exchange economies that these qualities of the border generate. At the intersubjective level, I also trace the possible reconfiguration of the border space beyond the potential for unpredictability and danger that attends public encounters with the state, or rerouting of public resources to personal ends.…”