The Social Production of Indifference

Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy

Michael Herzfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000323122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this fascinating book, Michael Herzfeld argues that 'modern' bureaucratically regulated societies are no more 'rational' or less 'symbolic' than the societies traditionally studied by anthropologists. Drawing primarily on the example of modern Greece and utilizing other European materials, he suggests that we cannot understand national bureaucracies divorced from local-level ideas about chance, personal character, social relationships and responsibility. He points out that both formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices rely heavily on the symbols and language of the moral boundaries between insiders and outsiders; a ready means of expressing prejudice and of justifying neglect. It therefore happens that societies with proud traditions of generous hospitality may paradoxically produce at the official level some of the most calculated indifference one can find anywhere.

CHAPTER ONE

One World or Two?

Bureaucracy: The Symbolism of Rational Government

One of the most commonly held assumptions of modernity is that the bureaucratically regulated state societies of “the West” are more rational - or less “symbolic” - than those of the rest of the world. This division is based on a circular argument” which provides the definitions of rationality and then finds it at home. It treats rationality as distinct from belief, yet demands an unquestioning faith not radically different from that exacted by some religions. Even critics of the state bureaucracy implicitly accept its idealized self-presentation. The nation-state represents perfect order; only the human actors are flawed. This has all the marks of a religious doctrine.

Yet our methods do not reflect the resemblance. It is as though we confronted two different worlds: symbolic analysis is appropriate for the soft definitions of religion and ritual, but the real world of government organization calls for sterner approaches. The implications are sometimes bluntly ethnocentric: “traditional or primitive societies” have “ritual” where the industrialized West enjoys the benefits of “rationalism” (Riggs 1962: 20, 30).¹ Even in indisputably “modern” societies, however, the separation of reason from ritual must obscure the practicalities of interaction between official rationality and daily experience. Nor will it do to dismiss as irrelevant the cosmological cast of commonly held ideas about bureaucracy, with their evocation of fate and chance, of innate personal as well as national character, and of blame and accountability. Formal regulations and day-to-day bureaucratic practices alike are fully embedded in everyday values; the idea of organizational reason is itself a symbolic construct with powerful ideological appeal.

1. Riggs (1962: 35) insists that his model does not describe particular societies, and that it could be used to isolate comparable features in American bureaucracy. His examples, however, are clearly ranked on a scale of modernity, and, while he does explicitly recognize that the features he attributes to “developing” societies reflect social inequalities, he apparently sees the resulting pattern as occurring in spite rather than because of the global domination of Western “rationalism.”

Consider again the conventional attitude to bureaucracy, and juxtapose it with this definition of ritual (Tambiah 1979: 119): “Ritual… is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts… whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition).’’ Almost without modification, this definition would also fit the popular view of bureaucracy because it describes some familiar aspects of bureaucratic practice: stereotype and practice meet on the common ground of convention.

One therefore cannot make sense of modernity without paying equal attention to the symbolic roots that it so determinedly rejects. Riggs (1962: 20) claimed that Western bureaucracies were less responsive to the constraints of culture than were the “folk” systems of the Third World, the latter perhaps being a more suitable object of study for anthropologists. Intermediate (“developing”) administrative systems displayed a combination of pure bureaucratic reason and culturally determined interest. This is at best a circular argument. Moreover, it predisposes analysis against any recognition of the cultural construction or symbolic import of Western bureaucratic practice. As a political scientist has wisely noted, however, “[p]ublic bureaucracies are sometimes portrayed as running roughshod over their societies, but they are bound by many thin but strong bonds to their societies and their values” (Peters 1989: 40). My goal is to explore some of those connections in the specific domain, so central to both administration and ideology, of the management of cultural and social identity - in other words, precisely where values play a defining role.

Max Weber articulated the ideal type of modern bureaucracy as a rational edifice built upon the secure foundations of a statistically regulated system of economics. He saw, however, that the stereotype of the unhelpful, interest-directed, buck-passing bureaucrat ran directly counter to the ideal type of the responsible government rationalist This does not prevent bureaucrats from appealing rhetorically to the ideal type in order to represent - or, rather, recast - their self-interested acts as public service. Despite many subsequent attempts to draft Weberian ideas into the service of Western administrative rationalism, Weber himself was well aware that the progressivist goal of a purely legal-rational bureaucracy was hardly feasible in practice (Diamant 1962: 70).

A bureaucrat’s ability to conjure up the image of rational devotion to public service may mask calculation of a more self-interested kind.² The rhetoric of predictable formalism is the key here; the routinization of expressive form plays a vital role in the consolidation of power (Bauman 1983: 150–151).³ Indeed, as Marx noted, the self-perpetuating formalism of bureaucracy is what makes its’power seem so unshakable (Lefort 1971: 290).

2. Shore (1989), for example, has recently given us a compelling account of the ways in which Italian university bureaucrats exploit the rhetoric of public service for highly self-interested ends.

3 It is surely an exaggeration to say of bureaucracy that “language can be said to ‘have’ people rather than people having’ language” (Ferguson 1984: 60); this may indeed be more usefully seen as an elegant rendering of political theodicy, as discussed here, whereby actors evade responsibility for their deeds. Skilled officials can always seek refuge in the authority of established rhetorical forms.

This formalism draws on Judeo-Christian and Indo-European concepts of the superiority of mind over matter, of thinkers over actors. It places rationality above and beyond mere experience, transcending the particularities of historical time and cultural place, and treats it as the outcome of an evolution leading from acceptance of the natural order to active volition, or, in Henry Maine’s terms (see Kuper 1988: 27), from status to contract.⁴ Weber’s insistence that Calvinism induced a productive work ethic in Europeans is an elaboration of this same thesis of a typically European, historically developed free will.⁵

4. This distinction has an enormous tenacity in social science. Riggs (1962: 29–30), for example, contrasts the ritualistic concerns of officials in “developing” countries with the Western model of contractual obligations to which they are nominally expected to adhere.

5. The idea that non-Europeans are inferior because they are intellectually passive dies hard. See Herzfeld 1987: 84–87.

This thesis treats European culture as the culmination of historical consciousness. The resulting model of “transcendence” - the separation of eternal truth from the mere contingencies of society and culture - crowns an intellectual genealogy usually traced back to fifth-century B.C. Athens (see Humphreys 1978). Its history is manifest destiny, the European spirit marching to the ultimate emancipation of intelligence from gross flesh.⁶ Its particular realizations include the idea of perfecdy context-free, abstract language and, in the field of bureaucratic administration, a rational Western model untrammeled by “ecology” - in other words, by whatever is specific to a particular culture (for example, Riggs 1962: 19).⁷

6. Onians (1951: 464–465) has charted the complex intellectual prehistory of such ideas in early European thought, showing that the idea of a transcendent intelligence arose gradually from a complex and widespread symbolic system. Vico (1744) was an early critic of Cartesian mind-body dualism on the grounds that any concept of pure abstraction necessarily overlooked the embodied and physical basis of all thought. Established ideas about mind and body are tenacious, however, even when scientific authority challenges them and scientific thought appears to race ahead of them (Béteille 1990: 500).

7. This does not necessarily follow from the thinking of Weber, who seems never to have doubted that “the kind of administrative staff one might expect to find in a given political system would vary with the form of legitimate authority claimed and accepted in that society” (Diamant 1962: 82; the comment is specifically addressed to the work of such authors as Presthus on Turkey). But while Diamant (1962: 82) notes that “[t]here is today general agreement that little can be gained by treating departures from the legal-rational bureaucratic model as ‘irrational’,” this perception has not proved sufficiently influential to undercut either the stereotype of Western rationality or its use as a rhetorical weapon both within and against the bureaucracies of supposedly non-Western countries.

There is a tremendous irony in all this, however, because the very idea of transcendence is itself highly contingent. It is also truculently political. “A system of thought presenting itself in terms of universal liberation through rationality is hard to refute” - and those who do not seem to understand it “become the modern barbarians living in the dark” (Tsoucalas 1991). Its cultural specificity becomes apparent from the degree to which it becomes transformed into quite different ways of doing things in these politically marginal places. While it has allowed local establishments to don the aura of the European Enlightenment, it has also served as a yardstick by which older and more powerful nations could disdain those clumsy imitators on the edges of Europe.

The idea of transcendence is of obvious utility to European nation-statism and its functionaries.⁸ As a filtering out of eternal verity from the circumstantial or contingent, it is the basis of authority in virtually all ideologies of state: it represents state power as naturally or divinely ordained, depending on the available theology. This is the rhetorical foundation for Marx’s view of bureaucracy, summarized by Mouzelis (1968: 9–10) as follows: “Its main task is to maintain the status quo and the privileges of its masters” through “the bureaucrat’s creation of special myths and symbols which sanctify and mystify further his position.”

8. I have avoided the simpler term “statism” throughout this book, as it is used by political scientists in the very precise meaning of social policies calling for strong bureaucratic intervention.

The state, as a rhetorical construct, is logically opposed to individual agency.⁹ In Kapferer’s (1988) felicitous terms, the legends of people undermine the myths of state. Whatever the prevailing system of government may be, the possibility of reinterpreting official pronouncements in terms of immediate social experience must always threaten it. This is reproduced on a more cosmic scale, when, in Darwin’s work (see Greenwood 1984), the idea of an immutable natural world order that was liable to only one kind of classification gave way for the first time to a theory according to which physical characteristics were contingent, accidental, and infinitely and interactively mutable. This new view of the world contradicts all notions of national “purity” - a foggy confusion of race and culture that continues to affect the bureaucratic handling of identity. It is hardly surprising that bureaucrats, especially minor officials, would succumb to this way of thinking, especially since social scientists were no less prone to it As late as 1904, Max Weber (1976: 30) himself still suspected that the supposedly fundamental cleft dividing Western rationality from Oriental thought was at least partly hereditary in origin.¹⁰ Even so understated a form of biological determinism, which is itself fatalistic, should properly make us wary of any hard-and-fast distinction between the Calvinist view of predestination and the alleged fatalism of Middle Eastern peoples. We shall return to this point later.

9. European nation-statism does endorse “individualism,” but this is a reductionist doctrine that formalizes agency. On the state as rhetorical construct, Delaney (n.d.), in an argument close to mine, shows how charges in the rhetorical management of kinship metaphors substantially contribute to the establishment of nationalist ideology.

10. The potential embarrassment of such genetic determinism in Weber’s thought perhaps also gives an alternative cast to Diamant’s (1962: 86) benign assessment that “Weber was convinced of the fundamental variability of social institutions and did not consider Western institutions as ‘natural’ models for all other societies.” Much turns on what Weber would have meant by “fundamental,” and his modest uncertainty about the actual role of heredity in determining cultural difference makes it virtually impossible to arrive at any clear conclusion. Diamant (1962: 71) wisely avoids speculation over what Weber’s reaction to Nazism would have been.

Arguments of Blood

Biology certainly offered a persuasive model of destiny to nineteenth-century scientific rationalism. The ancient humoral classification of human races persisted, not only in scientific theory, but also, and especially, in the sphere of ethnic politics and prejudice. These two strands fuse dramatically in the writings of the eugenicist Francis Galton, a major influence on the immigration policies of Anglo-Saxon countries (see Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin 1984: 27, 88). Greenwood (1984: 84) ironically summarizes Galton’s view of an essentially unchanging racial organization of humankind: “It appears that races are as they are because they were as they were.” A classification founded in unchanging nature, which Greenwood (1984: 67–68), following Ernst Mayr (1982), calls “essentialist,” also implicitly or explicitly provides the rationale for the essentialist claims of nationalism (see Geertz 1973: 240–241), and a model for the tautologous reasoning that underlies the bureaucratic handling of identity.

Weber’s view that cultural difference might be hereditary is an excellent illustration of how easy it has often been to conflate two kinds of essentialism, biological and cultural. An essentialism that turns blood into destiny - what Caro Baroja (1970) calls “the myth of national character” - is itself a doctrine of predestination, and depends as much on after-the-fact readings of events as fully as the rhetoric of fate in Greek villages and among Weber’s Calvinists. To paraphrase Greenwood’s Galton: a nation is what it is because it was fated to become what it was fated to become. Possibly the most dangerous word in all the vocabulary of racism, nationalism, and nation-statism is “is.” We hardly notice its corrosion of historical contingency.

The humoral system of classification, in which blood served as the point of departure for a moral code ranking whole peoples in order of their physical strength, mental agility, and moral courage, explained away all forms of cross-categorical switching as temporary aberration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Social Production of Indifference
• Chapter One One World or Two?
• Chapter Two The Roots of Indifference
• Chapter Three The Creativity of Stereotypes
• Chapter Four The Language Fetish
• Chapter Five Retrospective Fatalities
• Chapter Six Declassifications
• References
• Index