Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy

Bernstein, Anya

doi:10.1111/plar.12203

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…The event is an informal bureaucratic setting: there will be no sanctions or reper cussions for the witnesses if they do not comply with the bureaucratic force behind the event, as opposed to what contending with the structural violence of Israel's permit regime entails (Berda 2017). Interpersonal dynamics occur in bureaucratic state settings as well, offering bureaucracy agents creative leeway in their interactions (Bernstein 2017). A curious element in the event is how this creativity is utilized by the nonbureaucratic actors, and how it indexes and poignantly critiques both the omnipresentyetabsent state bureaucracy, and the very much present bureaucracy of HR.…”

Section: Re-calibrating Time In the Eventmentioning

confidence: 99%

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

Grinberg¹

2021

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This article shows that human rights NGOs sustain their relevance not by producing testimony texts and witness subject positions, but rather through the social and performative dimensions of events in which witnessing is transformed into testimony. The interactional dimensions between witness and documenter are usually omitted from textual representations due to NGOs’ rigid bureaucratic writing, and are also largely overlooked by scholars. Witnessing and testimony are analysed as spatiotemporal sites and occasions of contending with violence and colonialism. Through the peculiar case of Palestinian witnesses and Israeli NGOs’ sustained commitment to witnessing and testimony, despite shared acknowledgement of the failures of human rights, the event is theorized as malleable enough to be reshaped by its participants. These additional interactional layers may undermine the very logics of human rights witnessing and testimony.

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Section: Re-calibrating Time In the Eventmentioning

confidence: 99%

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

Grinberg¹

2021

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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“…The result is what I call stateless agency : a form of collectivized democratic authority that relies on the erasure of bureaucratic and elected state actors in order to maintain its legitimacy. My analysis thus contributes to work on bureaucracy, the developmental state, and governance by analyzing how processes of collectivization and erasure inhere in bureaucratic and democratic speech (Hull 2010; Bernstein 2017), looking beyond the production and circulation of documents in government offices to understand how a range of social actors co‐produce bureaucratic logics of collectivization and erasure in interaction.…”

Section: Bureaucracy Collectivization Erasurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the meeting “form” has been examined for its formal logics, rules, and capacity to generate (rather than solve) problems (Schwartzman 1987; 1989), this study aims to deepen our understanding of the “technologies of talk” (Gal, Kowalski, and Moore 2015, 611) that enable the emergence of a collectivized democratic will in the meetings underpinning panchayat governance. By integrating analysis of the ethnographic specificities of meetings, alongside the technologies of speech that emerge within them, we can better trace the semiotic logics that engender and sustain developmental projects around the world (Hull 2010; Bernstein 2017; Kockelman 2016).…”

Section: Bureaucracy Collectivization Erasurementioning

confidence: 99%

“No One is Poor in Himachal”: Cultivating Stateless Agency in an Indian Village Assembly

Carlan

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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This article examines the bedrock of rural governance in India—the village assembly, or gram sabha—and the deliberative process whereby citizens are designated as “below the poverty line” (BPL). I examine one gram sabha in Himachal Pradesh wherein BPL status was eradicated altogether, leaving hundreds of people ineligible for a vast array of state aid programs. I argue that this outcome relied on an interactional achievement whereby state actors (bureaucrats and elected representatives) rendered village residents into a collectivized agent while erasing their own role and responsibility from the proceedings. These semiotic processes of collectivization and erasure underlie what I call “stateless agency.” I trace three linguistic resources that cultivate stateless agency: (i) causative verbs that distribute agency across multiple grammatically encoded participant roles; (ii) code switches from the local language, Kangri, into a register of English‐infused Hindi that invokes what I call the “bureaucratic voice”; and (iii) metapragmatic statements that explicitly attribute agency to other speaker(s). This investigation builds on studies of grammar and political agency (Duranti 1990; 1994) and bureaucratic agency (Hull 2003; 2012) by demonstrating how linguistic resources mediate the paradoxical erasure of state actors from bureaucratic and democratic practice, with often drastic consequences for rural livelihoods.

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“…This variety of democratic configurations is in most cases not the result of incomplete or insincere efforts to engage democratic ideals. Rather, it highlights the socially embedded and emergent character of “actually existing democracies” (Bernstein , 29). That is, the politics that are articulated by these diverse renditions of democracy reflect how democratic discourses and political practices are engaged by people in a given context, and the manner in which these engagements are conditioned by and mediated through social and semiotic processes particular to that context (Bernstein ; Coles ; Hull ).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Rather, it highlights the socially embedded and emergent character of “actually existing democracies” (Bernstein , 29). That is, the politics that are articulated by these diverse renditions of democracy reflect how democratic discourses and political practices are engaged by people in a given context, and the manner in which these engagements are conditioned by and mediated through social and semiotic processes particular to that context (Bernstein ; Coles ; Hull ). Investigating how democracy and democratic politics are articulated in context, then, demands close attention to the minutiae of political practice, that is, the specific ways that individuals engage democracy's signature forms (its discourses and its technologies), how these engagements are positioned in relationship to existing conceptions of democratic politics, and how they are informed and conditioned by context‐specific political projects and histories, values, and communicative practices.…”

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confidence: 99%

A politics of respect: Reconfiguring democracy in Afro‐Brazilian religious activism in Salvador, Brazil

Hartikainen

2018

American Ethnologist

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A B S T R A C TAlternative politics of democracy shape and are shaped by dominant forms of democracy in circular fashion. In 2009 practitioners of Brazil's many Afro-Brazilian religions gathered in Salvador to develop a religiously grounded mode of democratic politics. Mobilizing a religious formulation of respect, participants in the gathering subsumed government ideals of democratic practice under Afro-Brazilian religious norms of hierarchy and the social order that they presupposed. These efforts were predicated on an artful combining and adapting of democratic and religious discourses and interactional practices. The Afro-Brazilian religious politics of democracy that was articulated by this political project did not only reflect religious valorizations of hierarchy but it also established a new foundation for democratic politics in Brazil. [alternative democracy, active citizenship, deliberation, religious activism, respect, Afro-Brazilian religions, Brazil] Políticas alternativas de democracia moldam e são moldadas por formas dominantes de democracia de maneira circular. Em 2009 praticantes das várias religiões afro-brasileiras se reuniram em Salvador para desenvolver um modo de política democrática com fundamentos religiosos. Mobilizando uma formulação religiosa de respeito, os participantes da reunião subordinaram os ideiais governamentais de prática democrática a normas religiosas afro-brasileiras de hierarquia eà ordem social que tais normas pressupõem. Esses esforços se basearam na astuta combinação e adaptação de discursos e práticas interativas de caráter democrático e religioso. A política religiosa afro-brasileira de democracia articulada por esse projeto político não apenas refletia valorizações religiosas de hierarquia, mas também estabeleceu um novo fundamento para a política democrática no Brasil. [democracia alternativa, cidadania ativa, deliberação, ativismo religioso, respeito, religiões afro-brasileiras, Brasil]

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Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy

Cited by 9 publications

References 45 publications

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

Witnessing and Testimony as Event

“No One is Poor in Himachal”: Cultivating Stateless Agency in an Indian Village Assembly

A politics of respect: Reconfiguring democracy in Afro‐Brazilian religious activism in Salvador, Brazil

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