Short Abstract

This panel studies the everyday bureaucratic work of categorising people—a contested practice that gives rise to polarised responses. Debates on changing or upholding social markers such as ethnicity, culture, gender, migration status and race in policy affect both bureaucrats and ethnographers.

Long Abstract

Bureaucratic categories that seek to reflect social identities in the face of power are condemned for being essentialising, while generic policy categories that seek to address all residents indiscriminately are critiqued for failing to address structural inequalities. For bureaucrats, differentiating people is not only a knowledge practice but also a way to allocate attention or money to their organisation’s goals. But there is a growing awareness that social worlds are far more unruly than policy target groups can capture, that categorisation is deeply political, and that the social lives of policy categories are polarising. Ethnicising, culturalizing, genderising, migrantising and racialising people allows bureaucrats to make claims about intersections of power and identity — but can also reinforce marginalisation. Ethnographers are summoned into this dilemmatic field as well, which shows that these dilemmas cannot be particularised to the people we are doing research with.

This panel interrogates shared epistemic dilemmas of ethnographers and bureaucrats. As bureaucrats, we understand various kinds of state and alongside-the-state actors such as police officers, teachers, municipal policy advisors, ministerial workers, and many more. We ask: How are dilemmas enacted vis-à-vis residents, politicians, civil society actors, and others? What gets lost in (not) using certain categories? How do bureaucrats and anthropologists inhabit the polarised worlds enacted by category-making? How can dilemmas about bureaucratic categories advance the anthropological imagination? We invite ethnographies of everyday bureaucratic work that address these questions. We are especially interested in collaborative research projects that understand bureaucrats and their clients as epistemic partners.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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