Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan

by Matthew S. Hull

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 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. Matthew S. Hull develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Pakistan, Ethnography

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 6, 2012

Reviews

[Hamza Sarfraz]

This is one of the best books I have ever read on urban Pakistan.

[ra4o4ek]

Hull's attention to mediation and social lives of bureaucratic artifacts provides a nice nuancing of Scott's arguments from Seeing Like a State and of Foucault's panopticon/panopticism model. He makes a compelling argument about the importance of seeing the state not like a unitary entity, but approaching it instead as an assemblage of discourses, actors, and practices. The book might be slightly difficult if you're not into semiotics and/or linguistic anthropology, but if you are, you will, most probably, find this book to be an intellectual treat.

[Aisha]

The book is a fantastic overview of bureaucratic functioning in Islamabad particularly and in Pakistan as a whole. That said, the theoretical argumentation (which is, at times, obtuse and self-indulgent) overshadows the more interesting ethnographic encounters between Hull and the CDA. A good book for scholars of semiotics and bureaucracy, a pass for those who just want to know more about the everyday functioning of Pakistani bureaucracy

[Nabeel Ahmed]

Fantastic account of how bureaucracy *actually* functions. Every public servant, especially in South Asia, should read this. The discussions of how different artifacts - the file, the letter, the chit - mediate both power and process in government are wonderful, worth revisiting over and over again.

[versarbre]

The chapter on petition is fun.

[Mike Mena]

Solid ethnography and great introduction to a couple linguistic theorists. I kinda wish he had done a bit more with linguistics stuff although I realize that was not likely the aim of his ethnography.

I think many people will be surprised at how good this book is...I didn't realize you could make bureaucracy interesting, but Hull does it!

[Jorge]

very interesting, excellent writing style