the materiality of bureaucracy in urban pakistan Hull, Matthew S. creator text xxu S.l.] University of California Press 2012 1st ed. monographic eng

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320 p. ; 23 cm. In the electronic age, documents appear to have escaped their paper confinement. But we are still surrounded by flows of paper with enormous consequences. In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers, imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. What are the implications of such a thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and purposes? Government of Paper explores this question in the routine yet unpredictable realm of the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps, petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations. Matthew S. Hull develops a fresh approach to state governance as a material practice, explaining why writing practices designed during the colonial era to isolate the government from society have become a means of participation in it. Matthew S. Hull. Bureaucracy City planning Government paperwork Municipal government Pakistan Pakistan--Islāmābād Political science Public records JS7093.A6 352.38709549149 HUL 2012 0520272153 (paperback) 9780520272156 (paperback) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520272153/chopaconline-20 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520272153/chopaconline-20 0 131212 20170105102926.0 ASIN0520272153