
GOVERNMENT OF PAPER: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan
University of California Press, 2012
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 unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. See Introduction.
Awarded the 2019 J.I. Staley Prize, School of Advanced Research
Hau Book Symposium on Government of Paper. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3): 399-47, 2013
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INCORPORATIONS:
Capitalism, Communication, and Collective Life
(In progress)
This project extends the anthropological study of governance from the state to modern public corporations. It will deal with fundamental issues of what the corporation is and does and how it fits within—even constitutes—our contemporary political-economic order. The book will argue that we need to place incorporation alongside commoditization as one of the major mechanisms through which human activities are drawn into capitalist processes—in this case, not entities, rights, and labor, but institutions of collective life. The book emphasizes governance, especially its communicative dimensions, rather than property, as key to the political-economic significance of corporations.
Contemporary states, especially republican ones with constitutions, share an unrecognized history with large-scale for-profit corporations. Constitutions, citizenship, racial exclusions, voting, free speech, freedom of assembly, and representative institutions all have roots in the business and governance arrangements of early corporations. This project places the liberal republican tradition within the history of corporations rather than only states. There is much to be learned by tracing the four-hundred year history of the corporation as it evolves from the world’s most democratic institution to its most authoritarian. This project will bring these two kinds of institutions, states and corporations, into a common history and analytic framework to generate unexpected insights into both.
The book will not be based on my ethnography, but will draw on the ethnography of others, as well as work in history, legal studies, philosophy, sociology, and business. In addition to discussing large-scale publicly traded corporations like Walmart and Amazon, it will also analyze a range of less familiar types including early colonial corporations such as the Virginia Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, the English East India Company, and medieval English guilds; and contemporary corporations founded on a various forms of sociality, including families, US churches, New Guinea lineages, the Pakistan Army, Native American Tribes, caste groups in India, American mosques, and Maori tribes.