In this meticulous ethnography of Pakistani officialdom and its practices, Matthew Hull focuses on how the physical dimensions of bureaucracy work. In acknowledging that the advent of electronic record-keeping may usher in a future very different from the transparency its exponents predict, he shows how paper trails intended to prevent corruption have already facilitated the special interests they were designed to defeat. Indeed, the entire book is an object lesson in how difficult it is to stabilize the meanings of the most formal legal prescriptions; sectarian disputes over the construction of mosques, for example, draw rich nourishment from procedures designed to avoid religious tensions between Muslims.
Bureaucracy, Hull shows, is embedded in a complex web of pre-existing social relations, typified by the role of mediators (“approach wallas”), that condition the uses of what he calls its “semiotic technology” (p. 27). In situations of state oppression, as when the authorities seek to displace villagers living on desirable land, such porosity, as he acknowledges, may not be a bad thing. Instruments devised to pinpoint citizens' actions often enable obfuscation instead (e.g., 166). Documents, like the tables and chairs of a government office, can be insidiously organized to channel status and promote self-interest.
Porosity was the last thing the modernist planners who designed Pakistan's capital at Islamabad—notably the Greek “ekistician” Constantinos Doxiadis—envisaged or wanted. Indeed, their goal, Hull argues, was precisely to isolate state functionaries, physically and socially, from networks that could corrupt them. Visually, Doxiadis' abhorrence of anything that did not enjoy the clarity of straight lines typifies the modernist ethic and aesthetic. He may have been reacting as much against the very similar forms of privacy in the Greek makhalas as those he decried in the (etymologically cognate) Pakistani mohalla. If so, he initially found a sympathetic response in official Pakistan, although his goals were thwarted and his own involvement abruptly terminated—an ignominious object lesson for planners who seek to reformulate the spatial arrangements of societies they do not know. Doxiadis famously advocated a return to the human scale, but his was a human scale of Western Enlightenment origins and high-modernist sensibility, not one grounded in local cultural values. Its unraveling is central to Hull's story.
Eschewing extremes of referential and purely constructivist interpretation, Hull shows how the Pakistani bureaucracy's semiotic technologies, often at least partially derived from British models and thus paralleled in India, affect the management of land, housing, mosques, and other elements of city planning. These technologies allow local people, including the bureaucrats themselves, to create claims advantageous to themselves in situations where sometimes the sedimentation of signatures and approvals in documentary form trump even the indisputable nonexistence of the actual landholdings in question. If documentation under the English East India Company had become a means of achieving “a palpable sedimentation of the real” (8) and had evolved into an instrument for suppressing “native corruption” (11), by now it is instead a means for the creation of new realities altogether. The virtuous intent behind such devices can thus easily, in the hands of agile operators, morph into its very opposite; for example, filing procedures, adroitly managed, enable the allocation of housing to officials above the standard their rank formally entitles them to. Conversely, as Hull also notes (e.g., 107), officials must sometimes justify adherence to legality where social norms would instead favor friends and kin.
Hull is at his most incisive when he addresses the balance of individual and collective forms of agency in the bureaucratic encounter. He shows how the individualizing devices of bureaucratic discourse, such as the signature, also become collectivizing mechanisms when individual officers want to evade personal responsibility. His discussion of how avoidance of the first-person pronoun deflects accountability (138) poses a valuable object lesson for academics too inclined to hide behind passive constructions.
Hull writes with vivid but good-humored intensity. He is alert both to historical changes and to local nuance, notably in the discussion of how Islamic notions of propriety preclude discussion of the future and even, astonishingly, led one of his informants to declare that in planning “we are not talking about the future” (142). In encounters with bureaucrats who showed him how they worked the system, Hull came to realize that documents and their organization played a causal role in generating and constraining decisions. In acknowledging this causality, operated by human agents with goals often in conflict with official values, he avoids reifying the role of documentation, and offers instead a richly textured exploration of how bureaucrats have operated the semiotic technologies of their calling across major changes in political, social, and religious context. In so doing, he raises ethnographically grounded questions, crucial for historians at least as much as for anthropologists, about how we interpret the documentation of events.
