The thought: I agree that power is overrated as an explanation. This is a term very much in need of the process articulated by Suzanne Langer that Geertz describes in “Thick Description”; an idea has been taken up as a panacea and inflated to such dimensions that it is now like the Wizard of Oz, very much in need of critics who will look behind the veil and discover the levers and their operators. It may have been Michael Fischer’s CA essay (recommended by Chris Kelty) where I saw this; but a good starting point might be to do what Weber does, treat power as an effect, i.e., the likelihood that people will obey an order or follow a rule, then look concretely at the factors that effect that likelihood.

The question: Has anyone read Michael Herzfeld’s The Social Production of Indifference ? I haven’t yet. Would anyone recommend it?

At this point I\’m steering away from highly charged domains like policing and health care because they\’re freighted with such high stakes that they make it hard to understand underlying social processes. (If I were looking for brilliant assessments of the way bureaucratic logic shapes modern police work, I need go no farther than my own department: my colleague Bob Jackall\’s latest book, _Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives_, is as good as contemporary ethnography gets–and it\’s a lot better written than most.) But if and when I decide to go down that road, I\’m happy to give Jeff M\’s new book a close examination.

A large, ethnographically-based literature on bureaucracy, policing, and law enforcement has been accumulating steadily since the 1950s. Its present disciplinary location is primarily in the spheres of “public administration” and “criminal justice,” but this appears to be changing rapidly in response to our present convergence of historical forces. In any case, Lipsky’s 1980 “Street Level Bureaucracy”is a classic, and useful to the issues under discussion here.

Also (a bit of self-promotion), if anyone is interested in a review of the “policing” themes of this literature in light of their relevance to a project of cultural anthropology, I have attempted to supply such as chapter two of my dissertation, “Keeping the Peace in a Changing Regime: Police Work in Taiwan” (2006, U of Chicago).

Second, could the statement that,
“None of that justifies the terrible way Graeber was treated during a period of personal and family vulnerability”–that is, legitimate system, bad people–be an example of the utopian practice that Graeber is himself criticizing? (“what I have come to think of as the defining feature of a utopian form of practice, in that, on discovering this, those maintaining the system conclude that the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved”)?

Oh, I think he does. It’s just that the link is in the opposite causal direction from that implied by “[s]tructural violence doesn’t need bureaucracy” — I think Graeber would say rather that bureaucracy needs structural violence — and isn’t negated by the observation that “bureaucracy isn’t invariably in the service of structural violence.” (So few things are invariably anything.)

But given the US status quo, the certification process is intended to enforce a reasonable standard.

The US status quo isn’t something an anarchist is likely to take as given!

The word “enforce” is an interesting one here. This summer I was in a panic because the Republicans decided that all Medicaid patients must produce documentation of citizenship, and my ex-lover and dearest friend, who has been in a nursing home for five years, had no documents. (She has multiple sclerosis, and has lost the use of all her limbs except her left arm and left thumb.)

So I was facing the distinct possibility that at some point after I exhausted my savings, sheriff’s marshals would cart Marsha out of the nursing home and dump her in the street to die. It wouldn’t happen because the nurses wanted her to die (but if they objected, they’d be fired and/or removed by force), it wouldn’t happen because the nursing home’s bookkeepers wanted her to die (but if they didn’t send a bill, they’d be fired), it wouldn’t happen because the marshals wanted her to die (but …).

Now as it happens, not even Republicans really want to dump old ladies out into the street to die. The Virginia state bureaucracy was busy promulgating rules that would blunt the effect of the federal rules by ignoring some of the more draconian provisions when the federal bureaucracy decided that the law didn’t actually mean what it said, and that anyone already on Medicare didn’t need to produce documentation.

So no dead old folks. The stupidity — the enforcement — is now mostly limited to children.

Clearly the folks who passed that law felt no need to do Graeber’s “constant
and often subtle work of interpretation, of endlessly imagining others’ points of view.” There may be reasons for that stupidity other than structural violence; but the structural violence is certainly there.

Graeber might have made a couple of important points, though. For instance, the purpose of all the paperwork associated with Medicaid certification is to establish that people who avail themselves of certain kinds of state assistance have no personal resources on which to draw. Admittedly, in a just society, everyone would have reasonable access to basic medical and end-of-life care regardless of their economic situation. I certainly won’t defend the US status quo, which is inconsistent with civilization as I understand it. But _given_ the US status quo, the certification process is intended to enforce a reasonable standard. Likewise the tussle over power of attorney, which is ostensibly organized to insure that elderly or disabled people aren’t exploited by others. None of that justifies the terrible way Graeber was treated during a period of personal and family vulnerability. But what’s the alternative? Should banks and other agencies deal casually with a legal process that essentially alienates from someone key aspects of human agency? Of course not. In a world of strangers, as they say, standards of accountability must be met.

So his story, with which I identify completely, is a tragic one that must be understood with reference to a sui generis logic unique to bureaucratic order. And that logic is scarcely on the map of anthropology.

I don’t hear Graeber as arguing either of those positions. He says that violence “invariably tend[s] to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.”

So it may often be that bureaucracy is trying to clean up, mitigate, or work around problems created by the situation of structural violence, rather than being directly in its service.