bureaucratic erasure

is the idea that at the heart of western bureaucratic practice is the systematic fracturing and fragmentation of human experience and a resultant virtual draining of content from the categories, and the disappearance of life, sometimes the object of their concern, from their analytical orders.

He situates his argument both in Weber's analysis of bureaucracy and in Foucault's discussion of how taxonomic systems emerged and developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the heart of Western Bureaucratic practice, Kapferer suggests, is the systematic fracturing and fragmentation of human experience. The resulting taxonomic schemes tend to take their structure from surface features and are inclined to stagnate, resulting in 'the virtual draining of content from the categories, and the disappearance of life, sometimes the object of their concern, from their analytical orders.' Categorical practices that distance people from lived experience have real consequences. Kapferer argues that these processes are intensified in new cultural orders established as a result of growing bureaucratic, scientific, technical, and military management, in conditions sounding rather like those accelerating in the arctic.' (the social life of stories: cruikshank)

bureaucratic erasure, n.All

bureaucratic erasure