Bureaucracies, from NGOs through government agencies to corporations, are crucial to applied and engaged anthropologists and are an important but neglected topic for anthropology as a whole. Central to their study is the topic of power and, in turn, a crucial step in inferring the marks of power is the ethnographic study of ordinary practices within organizations, beyond formal policy and administrative studies. For this reason, the article lays out a toolkit for “rapid organizational analyses” (Mascarenhas-Keyes 2001), the diagnosis of bureaucracies that face anthropologists, or even encompass them. The toolkit begins with broad brush approaches that attribute basic characteristics to all bureaucracies and then turns to particularistic angles meant to reveal the behaviors and ideas of specific organizations, branches, workers, and interfaces of bureaucrat and nonbureaucrat. Careful attention to how bureaucracies shape political agency leads us to ask how these entities affect applied and engaged anthropological practice. Doing what is “practical,” partly shaped by bureaucratic resources and regulations, is a key concept for exploring the political-ethical quandaries of engagement. The article concludes by looking at efforts to break with bureaucratic domination, including radical social movements. Though some degree of instrumental organization seems unavoidable, the specific balance of hierarchy and democracy matters, and anthropologists can contribute to documenting and understanding this.
