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CALL FOR PAPERS
The Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and PoLAR announce two upcoming Symposium Issues:

  • Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)
  • Bureaucracy


GETTING IT DONE: ETHNOGRAPHY OF AND IN NGOS

NGOs have been lauded as prime movers behind positive social change. Increasingly, however, anthropologists and others have critiqued NGOs for acting as handmaidens to liberalism or as an arm of the state. On the one hand, they promise the possibility of linking local marginalized populations with local, regional, national, and international structures of power. On the other hand, NGOs may harm the populations they purport to serve -- due to their uneasy relationships with the state, regulatory agencies, and social networks that provide legitimacy, as well as to the dilemmas posed by their own ongoing sustainability. This Symposium Issue examines the multiple intended and unintended functions of NGOs. NGOs are increasing in both presence and dominance, and they play key roles in both promoting and subverting discourses of power. Anthropologists are not only involved in ethnographic research on NGOs, but they also work for NGOs. Thus anthropologists are positioned both to understand the contested space within which NGOs work, and also to serve as advocates who promote the goals of NGOs. This Symposium welcomes papers that address the ambiguous roles of NGOs - and anthropologists -- as they negotiate these multifaceted positions. We hope to examine the roles of the state, global entities, activists, and the people whom NGOs purportedly serve. We also seek to bring together a range of perspectives regarding methodology, ethnography, and ethics in the study and practice of NGOs - perspectives that themselves may emanate from both theory and practice.

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLES AND ESSAYS TO US AT: polar@law.wisc.edu.

ARTICLES RECEIVED BY DECEMBER 20, 2009 will be considered for this Symposium Issue.


BUREAUCRACY: ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE STATE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” So opens Carl Schmitt’s famous treatise on sovereignty – a striking claim with some resonance in ethnographic work on law and the state.  On the other hand, as decades of linguistic anthropology have shown, it is rarely this simple on the ground.  A decisive event instigated by a willful individual does not simply set in motion an automatically applied rule.  Rather, there is an ongoing linguistic and social process whereby exceptions are negotiated on the ground. An asocial notion of sovereignty as something grabbed and possessed ignores the communicative process that lies at the heart of all political action. And the ongoing nature of governance means that even an exception requires maintenance and administration. This suggests that scholars interested in the workings and the effects of the state should look, at the very least, to the bureaucracies that keep it running.

We are making moves in this direction. Once reluctant to analyze the effects of the colonizing powers that brought them to their fieldsites, anthropologists now routinely invoke state policies and preferences to help analyze the sociocultural scenes they observe. Yet the state itself remains an elusive object of study, difficult to approach both practically and conceptually. In particular, anthropologists have been slow to treat state bureaucracy as a site for ethnography, and bureaucrats as participants in a complex social arena. At the intuitive level, many of us seem to share Schmitt’s disdain for everyday maintenance. Scholars looking at state institutions often focus on situations with clear one-way flows of power and monologic communication—speeches, announcements—where one can distinguish the voices and the persons representing the state to its people. Other studies look at arenas like courts, where heightened events like trials produce transcripts of stylized and constrained interactions. Few people investigate the main occupations of contemporary states: administration, regulation, delegation. And no wonder. The work of administration takes place in the fluorescent-lit rooms of drab office buildings where thousands of bureaucrats type streams of information into outdated computers or file handwritten notes in inaccessible archives. From all appearances, this is not an arena of political action at all. Bureaucracy, as some of our favorite literary works have shown us, obviates individual agency. The humanness of the human condition gets lost in the files, the halls, the shufflings of bureaucratic administration.

As social scientists, though, we can recognize bureaucratic administration as just another arena for social life and political action. Once we stop thinking of bureaucrats as a kind of person and think of them as persons who sometimes engage in a kind of activity, it becomes obvious that administration does not have to act as the conceptual counterweight to political action: it is simply not the case that some parts of the state decide while others merely carry out those decisions in a humdrum, mechanical fashion. Actual bureaucrats in actual bureaucracies, just like people in all sorts of other settings, constantly make decisions, interact with others, exceed their own control. As a lived social world, the administrative setting is not as drab and lifeless as it appears from the outside.

Indeed, in terms of their effects on the everyday life that anthropologists care about, the point-like rulings handed down by courts and the staccato tap of legislative enactments can’t compare to the ongoing work of creating and implementing regulations (of land use or of emissions) or willfully neglecting and ignoring them; keeping up services (like garbage collection) and structures (like bridges) or letting them stumble and crumble; following through with promised projects (for creating parks or paving roads) or forgetting about them.
   
This issue of PoLAR focuses on that aspect of the modern state that makes state functioning possible: its administrative apparatus. We invite scholars to look beyond how citizens represent the state and how the state represents itself, instead grounding their analytic viewpoint within the offices of state agencies themselves. We hope for a diversity of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives on the issue of state administration, and we especially encourage elucidations of how scholars can treat bureaucracies as sociopolitical arenas available to ethnographic, as much as to political, analysis.

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLES AND ESSAYS TO US at PoLAR@law.wisc.edu
ARTICLES RECEIVED BY MARCH 1, 2010 will be considered for this special issue.

    
PoLAR is the peer-reviewed bi-annual publication of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. The journal publishes in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell and publishes in print and online, on the Interscience platform as part of AnthroSource. It is widely indexed by anthropological and legal resources, including Anthropology Index, Communications Abstracts, Index to Periodical Articles related to Law, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Westlaw and Hein Online. URL: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1081-6976