Ethnography, Bureaucracy and Legal Knowledge in Latin American State Institutions: Law's Material and Technical Dimensions

Abstract

Law plays a central role in shaping the political, economic and social structures, a relationship that has been exposed by critical legal studies and socio-legal scholarship in Latin America and elsewhere. In this critical tradition, law is assumed as a key site for reproduction and contestation of various forms of power relations (Valverde 2003) and the state as a ?rationalized administrative form of political organization? (Das and Poole 2004) becomes the encompassing figure that dominates the analysis. Studying the state ethnographically allows scholars to move from the examination of a particular institutional form often rooted in bureaucracy?s binary rationality (Hoag 2011), to inquire in the actors? mundane political, regulatory and discipline practices through which the state is imagined, represented, and contested. In this vein, this essay furthers a particular interest in ethnographic explorations of different kinds of arrangements and social interactions among the subjects that work to construct, resist, and negotiate notions of the state in contemporary Latin America. Attention to how individuals and groups conceive, define, and experience the state, or the lack thereof, sheds light on the ways formal systems of law are used and appropriated by participants (Brunnegger and Faulk, 2016), contributing to expanded notions of law, justice, and the state. However, rather than locating these entanglements in domains ontologically different from the juridical forms of the state by resorting to analytical categories such as legal pluralism, we suggest that these dynamics become themselves entailments of state. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographically grounded contributions, this essay advances a different way of reconceptualizing the field of state institutions. In so doing, it seeks to spot new dynamics and power relations (Hage, 2011) that have been often forgotten or overlooked when theorizing about the state in Latin America.