The Object of Activism: Documents and Daily Life in Namibian NGOs

Abstract

Documents play a key role in the life of every NGO: donor reports, constitutions, membership databases, and promotional leaflets not only represent organizational action, but also have become a major form of civic activism themselves. In Namibia, NGOs are particularly pressed to show impact vis‐à‐vis a strong developmental state and an efficient private sector. “To document” has thus become a major preoccupation in their daily routine. This article asks what purpose documents do in NGOs and, through attention to their aesthetics, how they do them; and it shows that documents delineate social actions and actively shape NGOs’ daily work. The article's aims are twofold. First, its ethnographic approach to NGOs argues for an expanded range of possible actors that shape NGO work and everyday life. Second, it challenges the common ontological distinction between active subjects and passive objects by demonstrating the agency of things in organizational life more generally.

Political Documents and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurs: Lobbying the European Parliament during Turkey's EU Integration

“…Despite the long‐term privileging of people‐to‐people interactions over the artifacts of human interaction, cultural anthropologists have only recently begun to appreciate documents in this double presence. This bourgeoning scholarship has examined the form and aesthetics of documents, such as internal bureaucratic communiqués and international agreements (Gupta ; Hull ; Riles ); their affective states as in travel documents (Navaro‐Yashin , ); and their associative qualities through which political authorities relate to their subjects as in land titles, identification cards, and transparency documents (Gupta ; Ballestero ; Hetherington ; Höhn ; Jacob and Riles 2007; Jeganathan ; Lund ; see Hull for a review).…”

Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States

“…The article builds on the work by political and legal anthropologists have, in recent years, begun to systematically examine documents as a focus of inquiry, rather than a side-lined component, and to consider the political lives and implications of these documents (Barrera 2018;Borrelli and Andreeta 2019;Borrelli and Lindberg 2019;Chelcea 2016;Ellison 2017;Harper 1997;Höhn 2013;Riles 2006;Sheehan 2018;Suerbaum 2018;Trundle and Kaplonski 2011).…”

Civil Society, Everyday Life and the Possibilities for Development Studies

“…Kuzmanovic () highlights the difference between the civil society conceptualized in national and international policy documents and the one she experienced in Turkey, exemplifying the variety of contexts through which civil society is created and evolves. Ethnographic work also articulates the complexities of civil society, such as its changing forms and sometimes‐contradictory values (Hilhorst ) and the role of administrative realities in NGO practices (Höhn ).…”

“…The retreat of the state inevitably leaves a vacuum for other institutions, and civil society is often connected with the provision of services, for example, the construction of toilet blocks in informal settlements in India (McFarlane ). The style of this service provision, and other civil society activities, may be governed by the institutional norms of state and non‐state funders, for example, in the development field, Höhn () demonstrates the importance placed on certain tasks to secure funding and Dolhinow () articulates concerns about NGOs operating through forms of neoliberal governmentality. Despite a potentially hegemonic feel, those who are part of civil society also engage with issues of professionalization in uneven and unexpected ways (Jenkins ).…”

“…See Höhn (), for example, of an everyday practice associated with civil society – the role of documents in activist work in Namibia.…”