The Social Science Library » Putting Power in the Anthropology Bureaucracy: The Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Mexico-United States Border

Putting Power in the Anthropology Bureaucracy: The Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Mexico-United States Border

Author(s)	Heyman, Josiah McC.
Abstract	The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of organized power in orchestrating complex and unequal societies. This article reviews the development of bureaucracy studies, focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats in their efforts to control the actions of others. Then the central concept of thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels and relationships of power, with particular attention to the encompassing classifications and assumptions embodied in organizational worldviews. The worldviews of officers of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective perpetuation of undocumented labor migration. Human rights abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes of these thought-work routines. A stronger theoretical approach to organized power enhances applied anthropology’s ability to address the behavior of state and private bureaucracies with respect to the rights and interests of nonbureaucrats.
IssueNo	2
Pages	261-287
Article	Access to Article
Source	Current Anthropology
VolumeNo	36
PubDate	April 1995
ISBN_ISSN	0011-3204
Browse Path(s)	Anthropology —-Social/Cultural Anthropology ——–Political Practices, Organization, and Structure ————Anthropology and Public Policy

Putting Power in the Anthropology Bureaucracy: The Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Mexico-United States Border