Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I show how acts of forgery, concealment and manipulation are understood in terms of resistance and control. I thus suggest that cheating is a form of agency through which people understand and navigate through their social world.

Paper long abstract:

State Bureaucracies have long been established as important sites, where the state comes to be understood through apparently mundane administrative practices. Furthering this approach, I ask how these understandings are forged, negotiated and contested through bureaucratic encounters.

A prominent example of active resistance can be found in acts of forgery, concealment and manipulation. As I encountered during my fieldwork in an Israeli state bureaucracy, "cheating the system" is a common practice, which is used not only to gain personal benefits, but also to accomplish a sense of control over what was perceived to be an unjust and overly rigid organization, and in extension, of what was thought of as an excluding and unaccommodating nation-state.

However, these acts of resistance proved to be a source of disappointment for the clients who pursued them. Time and time again, employees of this bureaucracy not only blatantly ignored these attempts, but even went as far as to furnish them. Paradoxically, while clients thought of their cheating as justly resisting the state's inflexibility, they were simultaneously outraged by the flexibility shown towards them, as it crippled their own agency and denied them their sense of victory, even though they had received the benefits they were not legally entitled to.

Thus, I will suggest that cheating is not merely a means for the acquisition of financial or symbolic capital, but that it is also a form of agency through which people understand and navigate through their social world.