Government of Paper The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan [Paperback]

In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes?Government of Paperexplores this question in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. Matthew S. Hull develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it.

Matthew S. Hullis assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION

Writing of the Bureaucracy
Signs of Paper
Associations of Paper
Background of the Study

1. THE MASTER PLAN AND OTHER DOCUMENTS
Splendid Isolation
The Dynapolis and the Colonial City
Communities of All Classes and Categories
From Separation to Participation

2. PARCHIS, PETITIONS AND OFFICES
At Home in the Office
Parchis, Connections, and Recognition
Petitions: Citizens, Bureaucrats, and Supplicants
Parchis, Petitions, and Influence

3. FILES AND THE POLITICAL lS(