Introduction

Abstract

Ⅲ ABSTRACT: Bureaucracies are dynamic and interactive sociocultural worlds that drive knowledge production, power inequalities and subsequent social struggle, and violence. Th e authors featured in this special section mobilize their ethnographic data to examine bureaucracies as animated spaces where violence, whether physical, structural, or symbolic, manifests in everyday bureaucratic practices and relationships. Th e articles span geographic contexts (e.g., United States, Canada, Chile, Eritrea) and topics (e.g., migration, extractive economies, law and sociolegal change, and settler colonialism) but are bound together in their investigation of the violence of the administration of decisions, care, and control through bureaucratic means.

Distributed records in the Rohingya refugee diaspora: Arweave and the R-Archive

“…Although the early leaders of independent Burma frequently used the term “Rohingya” in official records and procedures to signal the inclusion of the Rohingya in the Burmese nation, the current government refuses this categorisation and instead classifies the Rohingya people as “Bengalis” and has forced them to be recorded as such, for example, in the 2014 national census. Such “weaponization” (Carbone et al ., 2020) by the state of the census and other forms of official records against the Rohingya people is part of a longer history of using what anthropologists term “bureaucratic violence” (Eldridge and Reinke, 2018; Graeber, 2015; Gupta, 2012) as a key mechanism for denying the historical citizenship of Rohingya people in Burma and suppressing their identity as a community.…”

Navigating the “Bureaucratic Beast” in North Carolina Hurricane Recovery

“…As anthropologists have argued elsewhere (Bear and Mathur 2015;Bernstein and Mertz 2011;Eldridge 2018;Eldridge and Reinke 2018;Gupta 2012;Reinke 2018), bureaucracies are not stagnant structures but rather are dynamic, interactive sociocultural worlds that shape everyday realities in myriad ways. Within bureaucratic spaces, decisions are made, knowledge is produced, power is shifted, and values and goals are imagined and reimagined (Bernstein and Mertz 2011;Eldridge and Reinke 2018).…”

“…As anthropologists have argued elsewhere (Bear and Mathur 2015;Bernstein and Mertz 2011;Eldridge 2018;Eldridge and Reinke 2018;Gupta 2012;Reinke 2018), bureaucracies are not stagnant structures but rather are dynamic, interactive sociocultural worlds that shape everyday realities in myriad ways. Within bureaucratic spaces, decisions are made, knowledge is produced, power is shifted, and values and goals are imagined and reimagined (Bernstein and Mertz 2011;Eldridge and Reinke 2018). Although bureaucratic entities may be depicted as monolithic institutions, ethnographic inquiry has revealed their existence as a "hyper-credentialized world" (Graeber 2015:41), where documentation is key in the struggle for access to resources (Sheehan 2018); where relationships among corporations, law, and human rights regimes continually shift (Guyol-Meinrath Echeverry 2018); and where power dynamics between settler-colonial states and Indigenous peoples are reified (Kim 2018).…”

“…Connecting research on bureaucracies with studies on the multiple dimensions of violence, scholars also point to the ways in which violence is enacted and perpetuated through normalized administrative processes and decision making (Eldridge 2018;Eldridge and Reinke 2018;Graeber 2015;Gupta 2012;Rajan 2001;Tyner and Rice 2015). S. Ravi Rajan (2001), for example, illustrates how bureaucratic violence plays out in the aftermath of the Bhopal catastrophe, describing bureaucratic violence as an "everyday form of violence" delivered by bureaucrats that manifests through several processes, including the absence of effective regulation and emergency planning, the lack of transparency, and bureaucratic rituals, routines, and accounting that inadequately address pain and suffering.…”

“…In these contexts, bureaucracy manifests in many forms with outcomes that span the violence continuum (Eldridge and Reinke 2018;Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004), which encompasses overlapping dimensions of physical, structural (Farmer 2004), symbolic (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2004), and slow violence (Nixon 2011). In particular, the pace of bureaucratic work enacts violence on those affected by disaster.…”