Matthew Hull’s book, Government of Paper, is a result of an ethnographic work conducted in the government offices of the Islamabad Capital Territory Administration (ICTA) and the Capital Development Authority (CDA) in the city of Islamabad, Pakistan during the 1990s. According to Hull, this work is a synthesis of insights from Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies and is intended to bring focus on what constitutes “significant dimensions of life in Pakistan” — the role of state institutions and their engagement with Pakistanis (p xiii). It does so through foregrounding the medium through which bureaucracy works in Pakistan — paper, in its various forms of graphic genres and by tracing the role played by them in the “flow of bureaucratic process and the production of the city” (p 32).

Hull, while focusing on what he calls “graphic artifacts,” shows “how the material forms of documentation and communication…shape the governance of the planned city of Islamabad” (p I). However, Hull contends that this materiality of bureaucracy has been an “essentially central component of colonial government in South Asia” (p 7). Therefore, what this book offers afresh, is an insight into how one of the least accessible and seemingly ‘opaque’ states of postcolonial South Asia rules itself based on this materiality along with demonstrating “how colonial practices operate in new ways in the postcolonial era” (p 6). This book can be read as comprised of two parts. In the first part, which includes the first three chapters, Hull discusses three different kinds of graphic genres one by one. The second part of the book, consisting of the next two chapters, “traces the relations among place, people, and paper in the government of specific projects” (p 33).

In the first chapter titled “The Master Plan and Other Documents,” Hull discusses the master plan created for the city of Islamabad and shows how even though “the basic provisions of the report are rarely violated…millions of more humble documents such as files, house plans, and forms,” play a major role in the “planning and regulation of the city” (p 58). The multiplicity of files limits the knowledge about housing units and therefore new allotments of housing units “run almost entirely on the local knowledge” of those with access to the relevant information (p 63). Furthermore, since the bureaucrats at different levels have privileged access to these documents, private individuals who need to engage with these documents remain at the bureaucratic mercy especially given the fact that “postcolonial Pakistan state is often not regarded as a moral actor” (p 60). Citing instances like these, Hull concludes that even though the “documentary infrastructure” has been set up to prevent the cases of corruption and related wrongdoings such as favorable allocation of housing units, the multiplicity of files and their maze-like organization has “facilitated practices it was produced to prevent” at the first place (p 65).

In the second chapter titled “Parchis, Petitions, and Offices,” Hull touches on a number of spatial aspects such as the office organization, gendered spaces within the government offices, and how officials consider the status of their visitors. Visitors, in turn, using different forms of paper such as a chit or a business card or parchi, try to mediate their encounters with officers. Hull notes that these chits might belong to a powerful politician or government officer, instead of the visitor herself, and therefore, serve as “his emblem and implies a material and therefore social relation of support between him and the bearer” (p 83). Since these cards are not personalized, Hull notes that they are prone to misuse.

Hull differentiates chits from other forms of documents such as petitions. While chits are an informal way of engagement with the state, petitions are formal and demonstrate greater political subjectivity of the bearer. However, Hull notes that often the petitions are accompanied by chits to lend ‘weight’ to them. Moreover, through the discussion of chits and petitions, Hull also demonstrates that the “material form, the manner of presentation, and the language” work in tandem to create a specific hierarchical relation between the petitioner and the addressee (p 90). For instance, in Pakistan, it is a widespread practice to submit petitions to the highest political authority which, according to Hull, is the “material enactment of the widely held views that influence is strongly concentrated at the apex of government” (p 104).

In the third chapter titled “Files and the Political Economy of Paper,” Hull notes that the “file is the workhorse of the Pakistan bureaucracy” (p 113). He differentiates his analysis of paper documentation from other previous works by implying that his work does not portray the “organization and circulation of written materials” simply as “isomorphic with formally structured social organization and interaction” (p 114). He notes that the “semiotic and material forms of files and their circulation supports a bureaucratic political economy far more complex than the one in which superiors control subordinates or one in which all are subject to a single irresistible discursive formation” (p 160).

Hull sees the file as a “technology” which creates relations between the people and the things by “materially enacting an authoritative decision” through various forms of inscriptions as events (p 127). Specific registers of language, movements of files multiple times through the bureaucratic chain of authority, and the symbolism of various kinds all play an important role in conferring authority to the files. Hull portrays files as constituting a “complex political economy of paper” (p 114) by which he means that the documentation through files do not necessarily increase institutional control, rather, the intensification of file-mediated decision making makes it even harder to pin down responsibility and leads to “diffusion of agency” (p 115). However, it is noteworthy that institutionalizing control and fixing accountability are the very functions for which files and written documentation had been utilized in the first place. Yet, official sanctions and punishments have mostly cited these written records and files as their basis. Hull notes that “through routine acts of writing, functionaries submit themselves as individuals to the opacity of the present and the vagaries of the future” (p 128). Therefore, files seem to be carrying out a dual function: subverting the institutional control as well as creating an atmosphere of anxiety within the bureaucrats about their authorship through the use of graphic forms such as signatures and stamps.

In the next two chapters, after having discussed the different artifacts of paper in the preceding three ethnographically-rich chapters, Hull demonstrates how these different forms of graphic artifacts engage with each other to constitute the complex political economy of Islamabad. One of the many reasons for this complication is that different graphic artifacts do not correspond with each other. For instance, Hull notes that the measurement methods used by the two separate government entities — Islamabad Land Directorate and the Planning Wing — are not standardized and hence, their units are not mutually convertible leading to “disjuncture between two land-reckoning systems within the same bureaucratic organization” (p 181). This non-convergence of representations creates an atmosphere of contestations where both sides lay claim to the truth using their perspectives. What is interesting in this case is that the underlying entity — land — is a rigid static referent that is indexed through contrasting semiotic repertoires. These semiotic technologies, moreover, have referential linkages with the real world (in this case, land) through practices embedded with ideologies and socio-political processes. These references in turn also “shape the sociocultural processes they mediate” (p 230).

Therefore, the semiotic technologies through which the state and the bureaucracy intend to dominate and control are turned against them through the expropriation of these “means of administration” by the very same populace (p 207). Hence, as Hull succinctly concludes, “government technologies have unexpected engagements with the different actors, objects, and environment they aim to control. These engagements come into view when we privilege neither putatively hegemonic government representation nor the realities they aim to document, but rather look at the teeming masses of mediators that connect them” (p 244).

Overall, the book presents to its readers an insight into the working of the bureaucracy in Pakistan. This is in itself a commendable feat given that most discourses on Pakistan remain focused on issues such as political instability, terrorism, nuclear weapons, etc. and forget that state institutions do function there as well. It does so by providing rich insights into how the modern post-colonial, paper-based bureaucratic systems functions, not simply according to a Weberian, straitjacketed understanding of bureaucracy as a rational-legal rule-based system, rather, through the paper-based technologies which subvert this ‘imagined’ rule-based system in multiple ways. By providing specific instances, it makes its readers understand how the wider populace, as well as bureaucrats, interact with each other and amongst themselves and thereby ‘enact’ the state and also visualizes it in their everyday interactions. It also presents a narrative about red-tapism and corruption which ails the bureaucracy, not just in Pakistan but in postcolonial South Asia as a whole.

Hull does touch on several issues but remains short of discussing some. such as the gendered spatiality within bureaucratic offices, the issue of corruption within the bureaucracy, and the electronic forms of governance. I would also like to highlight my discomfort with Hull’s description of the e-governance projects as less inclusive as compared to paper politics. To my mind, it would be naïve to negate their benefits without deeper analyses of their actual working.

This book offers an engaging ethnographic writing on what have been two rather difficult areas to access for researchers — the state of Pakistan and the bureaucracy in South Asia — and therefore is an important read for those interested in understanding the bureaucratic systems for instrumental purposes such as implementing e-governance projects.

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Nikhit Kumar Agrawal is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.