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Seen by the state: bureaucracy, visibility and governmentality in a Papua New Guinean hospital
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 15:33 authored by Alice StreetDrawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in PNG, this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers' performance of institutional 'transparency' and patients' careful management of their government health documents. In both examples people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to see and enter into a relationship with them. Against dominant Foucauldian theories of power-vision the article shows that, in the institutional crevices of a 'weak state', bureaucratic technologies operate as relational technologies that elicit affective motivations rather than as disciplinary technologies that transform the self
History
Publication status
- Published
Journal
The Australian Journal of AnthropologyISSN
1035-8811Publisher
Wiley-BlackwellExternal DOI
Issue
1Volume
23Page range
1-21Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes