The eye of the state: Business visibility and the production of public authority in northern Cameroon.

摘要

This study explores how repertoires of economic action enable distinct modes of public authority in Adamaoua Province (Cameroon). Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Cameroon between June 2003 and September 2005, this dissertation examines the repertoires of three segments of the provincial economy---the cattle trade, public contracting, and subcontracting in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline---as well as their interactions with the state, especially the tax administration. In recent decades, the Cameroonian state's attempts to regulate and control the economy have suffered from recurring economic crises, serious cuts in public spending, disaffection of civil servants, the regime's weak democratic credentials, and widespread corruption. Although there have been a succession of institutional reforms, which have left few areas of business regulation unchanged, levels of administrative efficiency have remained markedly low. In such an environment, an ethnographic lens captures the interplay between formal rules that change ostensibly and established business practices rooted in long-term historical processes of sedimentation and transformation. No matter how wide the gap may be between formal rules and established practices, the latter rely on laborious, finance-based agreements negotiated among a diverse range of state officials and business operators acting individually or in groups. Such dynamic articulations must have highly selective written counterparts---licenses, permits, contracts, invoices, and tax forms---through which participants shape how the state recognizes businesses and the breadth of their activities. These performances of business visibility, however, vary across different domains of Adamaoua's economy. While this work focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, its findings apply beyond that region. Its larger significance is twofold. First, it enriches our understanding of economic activities in environments marked by turbulence. Second, it explores how the bureaucratic system of the state in its daily functioning copes with internationally-imposed institutional reforms.