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2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 41720

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

Travels among the records


Some thoughts provoked by Government
of paper
Justin RICHLAND, University of Chicago

Comment on HULL, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The


materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

I am sitting in a hotel room in Berlin, in the midst of research travel that has taken
me, in the past two weeks, directly from the high desert mesas of the Hopi Indian
Reservation to the monumental architecture of the Mitte district, a former part of
East Berlin now an area full of high-end retail. I find that the opportunity I have
now to write about Matthew Hulls provocative Government of paper couldnt
have been better timed. Hulls book considers the place of documentsboth in
their production and circulationin the bureaucracy of Islamabad, Pakistan. In so
doing he makes a strong case for the need to attend not only to their semiotic
content but also equally to their material form when understanding that role. As
such, when reading this book alongside my travels, it seems to crystalize exactly the
kind of question that has been itching at the back of my mind, but that has struggled to come to the forenamely, what makes for a record, and what does a record
make?
Hull is not the first to take up the questions he pursues in Government of
paper, and he rightly acknowledges that in asking after the role of documents in the
constitution of bureaucratic practice, he wades into deep waters, with the likes of
such luminaries as Max Weber, Jack Goody, and Sandra Briet, to name only a
few. But as he shows, where these and other scholars have tended to focus on the
semiotic dimensions of bureaucratic writing, they perhaps overstate the immediacy
with which documents convey or store knowledge about the world. As he explains,
In addition to mediating semiosis, graphic artifacts as things are involved in nonThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Justin Richland.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online)

Justin RICHLAND

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semiotic events and happenings . . . it is often precisely the disjuncture between


communicative processes and the life of the artifact supporting them that shapes
the significance and consequences that these records produce for those who use
them (Hull 2012: 2223).
As Hull shows in the context of Islamabad bureaucracy, it is not just the
information collected and communicated in files, lists, and maps, but the material
qualities of how such documents sediment such communications that works their
particular efficacy in the institutional practices he observed. Whether it was in the
form of senior officials letters of support (parchi or chits) presented by persons
seeking official action (but on at least one occasion appeared to be a signed form
letter), or of directives inked by clerks in shorthand marks made in the margins of
documents being circulated for action, or some other such document, the manner
in which what Hull calls the graphic ideologies of these communicative materials
shaped how they were subsequently taken up by others. With parchi, as with files,
much seems to turn on questions of agency and the manner in which signatures
could be taken in some contexts as indexes of individual agency, but also sometimes, simultaneously, as the dispersal of such agency across wider groups. Particularly in his analysis of files circulating up and down the bureaucratic hierarchies,
Hull reveals many ways in which functionaries markings and their sequential appearance on the document page convert individually authored notations . . . into
corporate discourse (2012: 138) via the material accretions on the page, resulting
in the transmutation from a collection of utterances to an authoritative collective
decision (2012: 138) when it is recirculated and reinitialized.
It is precisely the capacity for such inscription and circulatory practices to at
once support the signification of individual authorshipbut also to minimize
reference to what exactly are the effects of a single functionarys actwhich Hull
explains allows for their particular bureaucratic efficacy in Islamabad. As he writes,
In short, these practices make it hard to understand who does anything . . . [providing] some functionaries with job security and others with cover
for questionable or outright illegal activities (2012: 115). In a very real sense, then,
the procedure becomes the decision-maker. For Hull, this helps explain both the
more conventional understanding of documents as essential media of bureaucratic action (2012: 134), which in Islamabad are also seen by many as fundamentally manipulable, and thus untrustworthy, phenomena. An act seems to have
been taken, somehow, on and through such documentary procedures, but it is
unclear by whom. And it is precisely this agency without identity, or perhaps with
only minimal corporate/bureaucratic identity, that leaves the individuals Hull
interviewed (both inside and outside the bureaucracy) suspicious of the documents
that make it run but also reliant on them for its operation.
Hull argues then that when attended to in their actual detail as both semiotic
and material phenomena, the documents that constitute Islamabad bureaucracy
show precisely the intermingling of the political and the personal, and how recordmaking and record-keeping can at once constitute the seemingly stable relations
between persons and between persons and things that are the hallmarks of
bureaucratic proceduralism, but also to reference a world of persons and things out
there beyond the bureaucracy. As he writes, In accounting for the efficacy of
documents, one does not have to choose between proceduralism and reference.
Procedurally correct documents compel compliance not because the documents
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 41720

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TRAVELS AMONG THE RECORDS

they generate supersede the realities the purport to represent, but because . . . bureaucratic procedures normatively embed documents in those
realities (Hull 2012: 26). Whether it is via petitions or parchi, files, or maps,
Government of paper persuasively argues that central to the efficacy of documents
is the strange alchemy afforded by their material and communicative elements
form and contentand the hermeneutic rip-rap that it generates, allowing documents to be stable and unstable, to shift and slide up and down scales of the
personal and the political, and to at once signify and elide the senses that those
who engage them (both within and without the bureaucracy) endeavor to attach to
them for various purposes.
It is this lesson I take with me, and to heart, on my current travels. In some
ways it is hard not to want to extend the metaphor of a record and its graphic form
when visiting Hopi and Germany, given the deep ways in which the past is inscribed in the present of the two places. Much as I try to bracket the supposed
ancientness of the Hopi pueblos, at least for purposes of understanding their
contemporary predicaments, their placement at the precarious edges of three
mesas and the construction of their central homes and kivas in native stone, mud,
and reeds, seem to always want to override my efforts in ways that even argue past
the cinder block houses, Japanese pickup trucks, and TV satellite dishes that also
make up and index the lived reality of contemporary Hopi village life.
Likewise, walking the main streets of the former East Berlin, I cannot help but
see the past. It appears in the WWII-era bullet-holes that still pockmark the walls
of the Pergamonmuseum. It is lodged even more complexly in the socialist architecture of Alexanderplatz, which when it is recalled as the product of having to be
rebuilt after suffering heavy Allied bombing in WWII, doubly voices the past in a
way that haunts the high-end shopping districts that now inhabit the area.
So, are these built spaces of the Hopi Reservation and Central Berlin records of
a sort? They seem in many ways to inscribe a past in the present that, while
perhaps only sometimes formally graphic, are always visual, always semiotic, and
certainly material. And the force with which I experience them does seem to
emerge from not just their material but also their communicative dimensions, and
do so in such a way that, at least for me, seems to both afford some kinds of understandings of place while eliding othersthat is, they seem to have an agency that
may have at once been individualized, or even collectivized, but now seems lodged
in the thing itself. I wonder then, how much of what Hull attributes to the graphic
character of written documentstheir ability to both signify stability across the
domains of their use and also to embed such moments in specific social arrangements and networks of belongingcouldnt also apply equally well to other kinds of
built things?
I just went to the window of my hotel room to watch the shoppers strolling
under the arcades of a socialist era building on Friedrichstrasse, just east of what is
now the cultural monument of Checkpoint Charlie. The building they stroll past,
however, now houses an H&M clothier, a Volkswagen showroom, and a Rolex
store. Do these shoppers feel the irony, I wonder? Are they haunted by the not-sodistant past that seems to me to surround us? Do these buildings, despite their very
present-day commercial residents, come to them, like they do to me, in a manner
that concretizes past events (at least of the structures, practices and valuesboth
bureaucratic and socialof their making), in buildings and street lights and, yes,
2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 41720

Justin RICHLAND

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graphic forms, whose semiotic and material qualities inform the time-space we now
share? If so, do they do so in the way that Hulls documents constitute the
bureaucracy of Islamabad? Or is this somehow of a different order of mutual
orientation than what is accomplished in, by, and through the records that Hull so
deftly follows?
I am not sure. But I am quite sure that in pushing us to take seriously the ways
in which the material and semiotic come together in the records he studied, Hull
has indeed offered us a promising new way of thinking not only about bureaucracy
but about the way in which social life more generally is structured, practiced, and
made meaningful.

References
Hull, Matthew S. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in
urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Justin B. Richland
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
1126. E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
773-702-7736
jrichland@uchicago.edu

2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 41720

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