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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 Street
Drawing 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 Anthropology

ISSN

1035-8811

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell

Issue

1

Volume

23

Page range

1-21

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-01-25

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