Street, Alice (2012) Seen by the state: bureaucracy, visibility and governmentality in a Papua New Guinean hospital. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23 (1). pp. 1-21. ISSN 1035-8811

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Abstract

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

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of Global Studies > Anthropology
Depositing User:	Alice Street
Date Deposited:	25 Jan 2013 14:21
Last Modified:	25 Jan 2013 14:21
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/10448

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