ABSTRACTHow does a big cat in India come to be identified as the one guilty of preying on humans? Indian conservationist law stipulates that the big cat must be identified before it is hunted down. But as I demonstrate ethnographically, there is no possible means of establishing the correct identity of a big cat before it is killed. Through an account of the impossibility of beastly identification, this article demonstrates the limits of both bureaucratic action and conservation in the government of big cats. What operates, instead, is a form of knowing the nonhuman Other, a knowing that is localized, personalized, affective, and momentary. Such forms of knowledge and living‐besides are called for by the Anthropocene. Indeed, an analytic potential of the Anthropocene lies in rendering untenable the continual disciplinary sequestering of the nonhuman and environmental from the political, bureaucratic, and legal. [bureaucracy, nonhuman animals, conservation, identification, government, Anthropocene, India]
How does a big cat in India come to be identified as the one guilty of preying on humans? Indian conservationist law stipulates that the big cat must be identified before it is hunted down. But as I demonstrate ethnographically, there is no possible means of establishing the correct identity of a big cat before it is killed. Through an account of the impossibility of beastly identification, this article demonstrates the limits of both bureaucratic action and conservation in the government of big cats. What operates, instead, is a form of knowing the nonhuman Other, a knowing that is localized, personalized, affective, and momentary. Such forms of knowledge and hying-besides are caked for by the Anthropocene. Indeed, an analytic potential of the Anthropocene lies in rendering untenable the continual disciplinary sequestering of the nonhuman and environmental from the political, bureaucratic, and legal.
Utopia, from the ancient Greek 'ou-topos' ('not a place' or 'nowhere'), quite literally refers to a place that is not there. Perhaps this emphasis on utopia as place is most starkly present in Thomas More's 1516 Utopia which was an island. Bureaucracy, a combination of the French word bureau (desk or office) and the Greek word kratos (rule), also originated as a form of rule or political power that is embedded in place - a desk, an office. These two types of non-places have, up until now, been kept largely separate. The Weberian disenchantedness and the 'iron cage of modernity' that is most commonly associated with bureaucracy are normally considered a far cry from the desirability implicit in non-place places and states of being that are utopias. In this act of putting utopias in conversation with bureaucracy and, in fact, considering utopianisation simultaneously a process and an ideal that forms the foundation of international organisations, this collection makes a series of intellectual manoeuvres that I briefly touch on as a focus on scale (the international/national/local); bureaucratisation and utopianisation as processes rather than states-of-(non-)being; methodological hooks; imaginaries of bureaucracy; and the value of comparison.
This article considers the demands for azadi (freedom) from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that were central to the protests that swept through India over 2019-2020. It does so by considering the processes through which such a gargantuan bureaucratic exercise would be executed as well as through a consideration of its attachment to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This leads to a conceptualization of the NRC as a “paper monster” possessed of the power to divide and devour India. The article argues that the bureaucratic processes demanded by the NRC would greatly exacerbate the violence of paperwork that lies at the heart of the Indian state. The NRC will strengthen the longstanding dubiousness associated with all documents and can only culminate in the creation of an alternate paper-based reality of who really is an Indian.
American AnthropologistVolume 121, Issue 1 p. 260-262 BOOK REVIEWS Success through Failure: Translation, Temporal Tricks, and Numeric Concept-Work Andrea Ballestero, Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Andrea Ballestero, Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13179Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume121, Issue1March 2019Pages 260-262 RelatedInformation
American AnthropologistVolume 121, Issue 1 p. 264-266 BOOK REVIEWS A Measure of the Measure of Measuring Nayanika Mathur, Nayanika Mathur Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Nayanika Mathur, Nayanika Mathur Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 February 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13182Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume121, Issue1March 2019Pages 264-266 RelatedInformation
In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a successful petition? This article studies petitions that have been efficacious in their appeals to capture or kill big cats in Himalayan India. The rates of success for any appeal against big cats are low in contemporary India, given the stringent legal regime that is geared almost exclusively towards the protection of the charismatic and endangered big cats as well as the hegemonic position occupied by wildlife conservationism. Furthermore, not only is it difficult to petition against cossetted big cats, but it is also not an easy task for any petition to be heard and acquiesced to. Through an ethnography of efficacious petitions, this article makes three related interventions. First, and in the process of attending to the rarity of a handful of efficacious petitions, this article argues for expanding our conceptualization of what, in practice, a petition is. It does so by outlining the changing forms of efficacious petitions, which can range from a telephone call, a register entry, a WhatsApp message from a smart phone, to the more ‘traditional’ paper-based petition. Beyond its ever-evolving medium, this article demonstrates the criticality of folding petitioning into a wider process that involves planning, performance, perseverance, repetition, and the capacity to elicit visceral responses. Finally, through an ethnographic foregrounding of human-big cat interactions, it demonstrates how an acceptance and elaboration of animal agency enriches the study of politico-legal processes.
Who do “we” anthropologists think “we” are? And how do forms and notions of collective disciplinary identity shape the way we think, write, and do anthropology? This volume explores how the anthropological “we” has been construed, transformed, and deployed across history and the global anthropological landscape. Drawing together both reflections and ethnographic case studies, it interrogates the critical—yet poorly studied—roles played by myriad anthropological “we” ss in generating and influencing anthropological theory, method, and analysis. In the process, new spaces are opened for reimagining who “we” are–and what “we,” and indeed anthropology, could become.
Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office ('bureau'). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an expanding corpus of work that concentrates its attention on explaining how different bureaucracies – from different arms of the state to NGOs to supranational organizations – actually function; what their 'inner worlds' are like; and why and how they produce the results they do. The second approach can be described as one that looks at how bureaucracies monitor or audit themselves as well as how they are pushing for self-reform. From a time when bureaucracies were almost entirely neglected by anthropologists due to a (mis)perception of them as disenchanted Weberian iron cages of modernity, there is now a far keener awareness of the operations of bureaucratic structures and demands. Nowhere is this more evident than in the critical awareness of bureaucratic demands and constrictions within Euro-American Universities. 8.5.2
Abstract This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which development performance, corruption, and transparency are established and adjudged in the contemporary Indian state. Corrupt state practices and transparent state functioning are authoritatively proclaimed through an assessment of evidence—material proof in the form of paper—that is constructed by the Indian state itself. The push for transparency in India at the moment is not only leading to an excessive focus on the production of these paper truths but, more dangerously, is also deflecting attention away from what is described as the ‘real’ (asli) life of welfare programmes. Ultimately, this article contends that we need to eschew treating corruption as an explanatory trope for the failure of development in India. Instead of devising ever-more punitive auditing regimes to stem the leakages of the Indian state, this work suggests that we need a clearer understanding of what the state really is; how—and through which material substances—it functions and demonstrates evidence of its accomplishments.
In simple terms, her sites are the institutions and terrains that are responsible for the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). As a progressive poverty alleviation scheme, the launch of the scheme carried great expectations from and of the state. But tracing the MGNREGS takes her into the homes and hearts of many. Crucially, she maps governance as a terrain of sentiment and affect.The story that unfolds through the generation of a labyrinth of paper is one of uncertainty, precarity and oscillating emotion towards sarkar. Mathur’s ethnography of government is very different from those we have read in the recent past—Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape (2012) and others. M athur provides an important corrective to the Weberian narrative of the bureaucracy being an impersonal vehicle of rules. Mathur shows emotion, drama, humour, apathy and cunning in the enactment of governance. She further shows the process of spatialisation of the state.
This article traces the introduction of the category of climate change into the Indian Himalaya. Climate change emerged as an explanation for recurring incidences of humananimal conflict and the disappearance of a protected species through the labors of the local state bureaucracy. Even as the narratives on climate change were being imbued with expert authority, counternarratives dealing with the very same phenomena voiced by long-term residents of the Himalayas were summarily dismissed by the state as constituting mere conspiracy theories. This article accords both these narratives equal space and details the effects of the explanatory force of climate change in this region. On the basis of ethnography centered on humans, big cats, bears, and musk deer, it argues for an enhanced ethnographic attention to the political work done in the name of climate change. The article questions the analytic utility of the concept of the Anthropocene and ends by outlining certain distinctive characteristics of climate change as a concept and call to act upon the world.
Bertolt Brecht famously advocated stripping the familiar of its inconspicuousness through estrangement. A typical day in the life of the NREGS cell requires little effort to make it strange. For, even though it consists of familiar practices of the type de Certeau (1988) has described as those that ‘produce without capitalising’ – reading, writing, talking, filing, attending meetings, drinking chai – the repetitive and invariable nature of the work with its extreme reliance on paper lends it, on the first encounter, a somewhat odd hue.
