Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussant: Michael Herzfeld

If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy. The first instalment of David’s thought on the topic came in his 2006 Malinowski lecture at the LSE – ‘Dead zones of the imagination’ – where he described a fundamental link between the blindness of bureaucracy and the nature of structural violence. The lecture later became an essay in ‘The Utopia of Rules’ (2015). The book significantly expanded the discussion to cover technology and popular culture, making a case for the stupidity of bureaucracy that anticipated his later work on bullshit jobs. Here, Michael Herzfeld dissects the merits and flaws of Graeber’s thought-provoking ideas on bureaucracy and examines whether they hold up to ethnographic scrutiny. For this week only, we have the papers, but not the videos, of the seminar. On the scheduled day of the seminar, the LSE faculty went on strike to fight against poor working conditions in academia that are compounded precisely by the kind of bureaucratic structures that David attacked in the book. 

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These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

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Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University and IIAS Professor of Critical Heritage Studies Emeritus at the University of Leiden, is the author of twelve books, most recently Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, and also including Ours Once More: Folklore Ideology and The Making of Modern Greece and The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. He is currently working on a global study of crypto-colonialism.