Introduction: The Administration of Everyday Life

Introduction:The Administration of Everyday Life Andrew Haxby Do citizens resist bureaucratic governance, or do they seek to be recognized by it? Can everyday engagements with formal procedures be reduced to self-interested strategy or rationalized rule following? What are the politics of rule breaking? Such questions undergird the contributions to this special issue on bureaucracy and development in Nepal. Analyzing a diverse array of formalized practices, including income verification of clients at private banks, community managed road construction, and the regulation of housing reconstruction following the 2015 Great Nepal Earthquake, this special issue elucidates how bureaucratic procedures have become entwined with social practices often assumed to be beyond the purview of formal governance. Our contribution is twofold. At an area studies level, we cast light on a dimension of social life in Nepal and the Himalayas that is often overlooked in a research literature historically rooted in ritual, religious, ethnic identity, and kinship studies. Following recent Nepal-focused works of anthropology that have explored the entanglement of social life with state and international institutions, we show how bureaucratic practices have shaped this entanglement towards unexpected ends. On a theoretical level, we challenge ethnographic engagements with development, governance, and neoliberal economics that focus narrowly on the discursive relations of power-knowledge in these arenas. While the discourses of development, modernity, and corruption continue to structure international power relations in specific and important ways—a fact that all our End Page 205 authors address and reckon with—we aim to push past a mode of analysis that limits itself to only diagnosing such power relations within a variety of locales. In this way, we build on recent work arguing for a more practice-oriented approach to understanding bureaucratic management, one that doesn't reduce formal procedures to a transparent enaction of power and ideology. Through fine-grained analyses of how such procedures are implemented within specific ethnographic contexts, we present bureaucratic engagements as locations for sui generis social inventions, and not simply echoes of power formations constructed elsewhere. In keeping with this approach, we've entitled this special issue "The Administration of Everyday Life in Nepal," to indicate our focus on the transactions and procedures that co-construct state authorities, market institutions, and domestic life. While the term "administration" suggests top-down private or public governance, our works show how administrative actions often move against this grain, crisscrossing between different institutions, corporate bodies, and kinship groups, allowing for innovative and strategic practices among human agents that capitalize on the affordances and entailments built into the procedures themselves. In doing so, we emphasize the productive dimension of administration, examining instances of unexpected creation within its apparent stringent formality. Such a focus helps to undermine a diffusionist narrative of modernism and globalization, while also bringing us more in line with the strategies and subjectivities of those who must navigate these systems. Our regional focus dovetails with this approach. On the one hand, Nepal's historically peripheral position, ethnic fluidity, and recent civil upheavals have cast large swaths of the country as an annex of James Scott's Zomia (2009), with only tenuous relations to modern state and international governance (de Sales 2007, Hutt 2004, Shneiderman 2010). On the other hand, the formalization of Nepal's political economy—often at the behest of an empowered international development sector—speaks to a process of rapid integration within global capitalism (Haxby 2017, Hirslund 2019). One of the fastest urbanizing countries in Asia, Nepal has become a site of massive investment in hydropower and road infrastructure, as well as investments in education, real estate, and post-disaster reconstruction, much of it financed by way of the remittances sent from the almost six million Nepalis working abroad (Karki Nepal 2016, Liechty 2003, Lord 2016). Our articles do not resolve this tension. Instead, we use it to inspire fresh analysis of the transaction and procedures at the center End Page 206 of Nepali life, including how clients, loan officials, users' committees, and earthquake victims make strategic decisions and political claims to advance their understandings of the good life and the good society. Rethinking Administration At the heart of this collaboration is our contention that anthropological approaches to development, governance...