We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie.
- Authors
Göpfert, Mirco
- Abstract
Nigérien jendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciatiPn of these documents in the gendarmes' socio professional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and of justifying and actualizing gendarmes' self-perception as intellectuals in uniform. Bureaucratic work, I argue, is always also aesthetic work, and bureaucratic aesthetics is where aesthetic, pragmatic, and legal reasonings become one.
- Subjects
NIGERIEN politics &; government, 1993-; AESTHETICS; BUREAUCRACY; RURAL police; PRAGMATICS
- Publication
American Ethnologist, 2013, Vol 40, Issue 2, p324
- ISSN
0094-0496
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/amet.12024