Government of Paper. The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan

摘要

Matthew S. Hull presents us with a study of the bureaucratic process of a government agency in Pakistan: the Central Development Authority (CDA), administering its capital city of Islamabad. He gives insight into the intricate social life of paperwork at the heart of the bureaucratic process. Hull's project is ambitious. On the one hand, he attempts to elucidate the minute working of city administration, and, on the other hand, to make a generic statement to explain crisis and stability of the Pakistani state (p. 4). The resulting book at hand is a fine-grained anthropology of the modern state studied through the flow of the bureaucratic process and the production of the city of Islamabad.