Social Anthropology

Maguire, Mark, Ursula Rao, Nils Zurawski (eds.) 2018. Bodies as evidence: security, knowledge, and power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 256 pp. Pb.: US$25.95. ISBN: 9781478002949.

Aistara, Guntra A. 2018. Organic sovereignties: struggles over farming in an age of free trade. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 9780295743110.

This paper focuses on the ambivalent effects of the sudden human rights activism inflation and civil society development in Turkey between 2007 and 2011 – a period of provisional liberalisation of the socio‐political sphere that was accompanied by the professionalisation of the bureaucratic realm. I argue that contrary to the recent critical literature on such rights, which contends that liberalisation and bureaucratisation of human rights rhetoric have led to its de‐politicisation and de‐radicalisation in the post‐Cold War period, the particular political path of human rights in Turkey produced less streamlined, more complex results. While their transformation from a stigmatised rhetoric of radical opposition to a celebrated instrument for good governance has introduced parallel human rights initiatives and the emergence of an alternative interpretation of human rights in the official governmental realm, this did not lead to eliminating radical political interpretations. A careful examination of Turkey’s human rights circles reveals that (despite attempts to consolidate these rights as politically neutral, which fall within a single field and encourage a liberal vision of governance) the period under review is rather characterised by both an intensification of the discussions and negotiations between the many actors involved as well as by their confrontation.

This paper investigates the bureaucratisation of the (utopian) ideal of community participation in Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) safeguarding and management. The analysis considers the whole ‘policy life’ of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. Our ethnographic examples from UNESCO, Brazil, China and Greece illustrate how bureaucratic operations often disenchant the participatory ideal, alienating it from its original intention. At the same time, driven by their commitment to ‘good’ governance and informed by sentiments of frustration and disappointment with actual policy results, vocational bureaucrats at different administrative levels experiment with and conceive of new tools in order to produce evidence of participation. We demonstrate how this bureaucratic creativity has concrete consequences, which may differ from the intended utopia, but nevertheless bring to life particular interpretations of the participatory principle among the recipients for whom heritage policies were originally designed. Thus, we present a more nuanced picture of bureaucratisation in which officials’ emotions and engagement sustain their agency against structural constraints as well as the futility and fragility of administrative procedures.

Much has been made of the Agambenian framework of exception and the regime of legal suspension it establishes. This paper ethnographically examines the hard work that is required to produce legal suspension within the parameters of the law by looking at the practice of property restitution of transitional institutions in post‐war Kosovo. Kosovo’s ‘black hole state’ reveals how the legal bureaucracies established to usher in human rights serve to perpetuate the state of suspension rather than realising their utopian goals.

The mandate of the ICRC as granted by the Geneva Conventions is to act as a ‘guardian of International Humanitarian Law’ on the frontlines of conflicts. While its humanitarian relief operations have contributed to its international reputation, this monitoring function is rather unknown to the public. In this paper, I pay specific attention to activities carried out by ICRC delegates to protect various categories of victims in times of war. By focusing on the ways in which delegates interpret the principles (‘neutrality’, ‘impartiality’, ‘confidentiality’) that guide their actions, I seek to decipher the organisation’s ethos and worldview. I highlight the hopes as well as the frustrations and disappointments generated by myriad administrative techniques devised to engage parties to a conflict in a ‘confidential dialogue’ on the conduct of hostilities. Finally, I examine how these techniques, built on the hope in the possibility of communication, are changing as a result of external sources of pressure for ‘evidence‐based programming’, turning personalised case‐based monitoring into a new form of ‘audit culture’ based on statistical evidence. Paradoxically, relying on numbers to realise the utopia of ‘humanising war’ makes the very ‘humans’ who are supposed to benefit from it disappear from view.

Three decades before the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the international community – in its newly institutionalised guise as a League of Nations – was charged by its covenant to guarantee the rights and protections of a more limited number of people: those considered to be ‘persons belonging to minorities of race, religion or language’ in certain primarily east European states. The everyday work of ‘supervising’ the minorities treaties was carried out by newly recruited members of an entirely unprecedented genre of administration: an international civil service whose role was to support the League of Nations in all its various activities. This paper draws on unpublished interviews from 1965 and 1966, archival documents and first‐person retrospective accounts in which international civil servants describe and reflect on their work on minorities treaty supervision in the new international institution widely seen as an ‘experiment’. Focusing on the accounts of one important figure, the Spaniard Pablo de Azcárate (who served in the Administrative Commissions and Minorities Questions Section of the League of Nations Secretariat from 1922 to 1933), it explores the ethos, aspirations, frustrations and working practices of international civil servants in an institution still in formation and not yet fully bureaucratised.

Were, Graeme. 2019. How materials matter: design, innovation and materiality in the Pacific. New York: Berghahn Books. 212 pp. Hb.: US$120.00. ISBN: 9781789202014.

The bureaucratisation of utopia

Ethics, affects and subjectivities in international governance processes

This paper is about the intensive narrative work and the agony of adoptive mothers on how to talk to their children about their lives before the adoption, about a story that was partly unknown, about a past that the parents haven’t lived. These anxieties reveal that this struggle with language and the creation of stories was fundamental to their own becoming as mothers. I argue that a ‘kinning process’ is sustained through the repetition of children’s biographies and that, through the narration and re‐narration, of children’s placement and the existence of the birthmothers, adoptive mothers construct relations with their children and also their maternal self.

Utopia, from the ancient Greek ‘’ (‘not a place’ or ‘nowhere’), quite literally refers to a place that is not there. Perhaps this emphasis on utopia as place is most starkly present in Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia which was an island. Bureaucracy, a combination of the French word (desk or office) and the Greek word (rule), also originated as a form of rule or political power that is embedded in place – a desk, an office. These two types of non‐places have, up until now, been kept largely separate. The Weberian disenchantedness and the ‘iron cage of modernity’ that is most commonly associated with bureaucracy are normally considered a far cry from the desirability implicit in non‐place places and states of being that are utopias. In this act of putting utopias in conversation with bureaucracy and, in fact, considering utopianisation simultaneously a process and an ideal that forms the foundation of international organisations, this collection makes a series of intellectual manoeuvres that I briefly touch on as a focus on scale (the international/national/local); bureaucratisation and utopianisation as processes rather than states‐of‐(non‐)being; methodological hooks; imaginaries of bureaucracy; and the value of comparison.

Erdmute, Alber. 2018. Transfers of belonging. Child fostering in West Africa in the 20th century Leiden, Boston: Brill. 269 pp. Pb: €66. ISBN: 978‐90‐04‐35980‐2.

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