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Paper short abstract

Through an auto ethnography of my experience with the state, I trace documents, discourse, actors of the district administration up to refusal to work with the Dongria Kondh community in India and argue paradox and play to be central in state practices and of being constitutive of its power.

Paper long abstract

Through an auto ethnography of my encounter with the state in southern Odisha to work with Dongria Kondh ‘tribal’, Adivasi group in India who are having protracted battle with the state and mining giant Vedanta, I trace through assemblages of documents, discourse, actors at various level of the district administration through the point when I am refused access to work with the community and posit it to be a bricoleur. Through such tracing, I highlight a comedy of errors, confusion between departments, rebellion from within, to illustrate the state as paradoxical and playful as opposed to a Weberian rational bureaucratic entity that is unified and purposive. I demonstrate how ‘infinite play’ is central to such a bricolage where existing discourses around indigeneity, the savageness of tribals, are mobilized along with tropes of preservation of culture, mingling with mixtures of executive orders and relying on wait times, and spaces of ambiguity. In the end, I show how ‘whatever works’, ‘this or that’, finally ends with a completely different note that lands in my mailbox, refusing access to the community. Further, juxtaposing this with how the community itself perceived me, I highlight the rather paradoxical nature of the state in reifying relations and marking a clear divide through the tribal ‘other’ while attempting to mainstream the peoples, and argue that such imposed and argued isolationism is used non-uniformly and is paradoxical, but that both such paradox and play is constitutive of the state and its power