Paper Tiger

Nayanika Mathur is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

• Acknowledgements; Glossary; Acronyms; Prologue; Introduction; 1. A remote town: the paper state; 2. The state life of law; 3. The material production of transparency; 4. The letter of the state; 5. Meeting one another: paper tiger?; 6. The reign of terror of the big cat; Conclusion: the state as a paper tiger; References; Index.

'This outstanding ethnography offers a rich glimpse of the workings of the state in a remote area of India. It shows that the problem of the implementation of law in India is less a problem of corruption or of neo-liberal governmentality and more a problem of the way in which the social life of paper produces a strange combination of affect and effect at the local level. Bureaucratic rule is created through the materiality of documents, letters and written texts which implement the state rather than the law, a paradox which explains both the omnipresence of the state and its limited effects on policy. This book will be of great interest to all students of the state, law and bureaucracy.' Arjun Appadurai, New York University