Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- The master plan and other documents -- Parchis, petitions and offices: approaches to the bureaucracy -- Files and the political economy of paper -- The expropriation of land and the misappropriation of lists -- Maps, mosques, and maslaks: ecumenical planning and sectarian conflict

In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? Government of Paper explores this question in the routine yet.

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.

In 1956 the Indian Government invited the Ford Foundation to assist with a master plan for the Delhi region. Two years later, the invitation was extended to help with a separate urban community development program. Even though the master plan was a comprehensive project covering transportation, water, sewage, housing, industry, and zoning, the creation of community and communities was one of its main goals. TheDraft Master Plan for Delhi(DMPD) declared "in all planning for man's environments," it was "extremely vital" to "evolve a well integrated new community pattern that would fit the changed living conditions of the new age and promote genuine democratic growth." Similarly, the primary objective of the urban community development project, as laid out by the Commissioner of Delhi, was that of "giving form to an urban community, which has been drawn from backgrounds varying from one another and trying to achieve a homogeneity."

Abstract
Files may seem an obvious topic for historians of public administration, but that is by no means self-evident. Despite the interest in files from sociologists and archival scientists in the early 20th century, historians have engaged more with the contents of files than with their genres, materialities and functions. After tracing the theoretical and methodological engagements with files from Max Weber and Heinrich Otto Meisner to Cornelia Vismann and Bruno Latour, we argue firstly that files are defined by their relation to other records they compile. At the same time, they transmute these documents into cases and bureaucratic objects. Secondly, just as files bring documents together, they connect the activities of individuals and organizations. However, we argue that the degree to which files are instruments of formal administrative control and organizational coherence has been exaggerated, obscuring the agency of users and the potential for files to serve other ends.