Review of 'Paper Tiger' in American Ethnologist

Book Reviews in the ways they consume and how they study their faith through guided readings of the Quran involve connections with what is envisioned as a modern, global Muslim ummat (community), one that is deparochialized and perhaps even deracinated, as well as an emphasis on an Islam that depends directly on the textual authority of the Quran interpreted in a very particular way. Another critical aspect of modernity in Pakistan that Maqsood explores here is the idea of the imagined (usually Western) outside observer, noting that “reflections on what it means to be a modern Muslim requires the presence of an imagined audience, but one that seamlessly transitions from the local setting to a global stage” (88). Maqsood makes a key point: her interlocutors resist identification with particular fiqh (schools of jurisprudence) or established revivalist movements (Barelvi, Deobandi, and so forth). As these are often the starting points for scholarly descriptions of Islamic revivalism in South Asia, it is refreshing to see how in the lived experiences of middle-class Lahoris these distinctions of school, sect, and movement are much less clear-cut. Readers not familiar with these various movements, political groups, and schools of thought may need to do supplemental reading. Also, there is a surprising lack of engagement with theoretical approaches to gender, surprising not only given the fact that the majority of Maqsood’s interlocutors are women (who often discuss gendered practices such as veiling) but also given the large body of work on gender and piety in South Asia and Islam. Ultimately, however, Maqsood’s analysis of class and piety in Lahore does laudable and innovative work to destabilize received binaries such as Islam versus the West or South Asian Islam versus Middle Eastern Islam. For instance, I have often heard Pakistanis who identify as liberal or progressive criticize the increasing popularity of Middle Eastern styles of hijab and abaya as a simple parroting of Arab fashion and as a misguided rejection of indigenous South Asian veiling styles. With compelling detail, Maqsood reframes this debate, both offering a nuanced understanding of women’s personal choices and agency in veiling practices and charting the flows of these cultural forms not from the Middle East but as a direct result of the experiences of and communication with the vast Pakistani diaspora living in the West. Veiling in Middle Eastern rather than South Asian styles and a host of other Islamic practices are thus not simple denunciations of local traditions and alignments with Arab cultural practices (perhaps seen as more authentically Muslim) but actually represent alignments with global socialities created as a direct result of migration under neoliberalism. Not only is this book an extremely fresh and engaging ethnography, it also does an excellent job of complicating our understanding of the connections among social class, modernity, and piety in South Asia. Maqsood elegantly ! American Ethnologist destabilizes much of the received wisdom that, even in recent academic writing, clings to a certain view of the relationship between social hierarchies and Islamic revivalism in Pakistan, in particular, the notion that revivalism acts as a refuge for the poor, who in turn are radicalized and swayed toward violent extremism. As such, and despite the fact that it could have benefited from more engagement with the large theoretical body of work on gender and piety in Islam, this book will certainly be of great value to scholars generally interested in Islam, Pakistan, or religion in South Asia. It makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of the relationships between religious practices and modernity in the neoliberal era. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Nayanika Mathur. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 204 pp. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12687 JASON CONS University of Texas at Austin In recent years, South Asia has been a generative location for rethinking the anthropology of the state. Whether in Akhil Gupta’s account of structural violence, Matthew Hull’s exploration of the social and political life of the file, or Laura Bear’s engagement with austerity—to provide but a few examples—the state and especially its bureaucracies have proved fruitful sites for unsettling easy understandings of the relationships between rules and practices. Nayanika Mathur’s magnificent Paper Tiger stands out in this emerging field. It takes the ethnography of the state in new and dynamic directions via a grounded and beautifully written study of the social life of law, bureaucracy, and development in a village far away from the center of the state. The remote village is Gopeshwar, the administrative headquarters of the borderland district of Chamoli in the state of Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas. Gopeshwar, its surrounding terrain, and particularly its government offices—where workers who feel as though they are languishing away in a backwater carry out the bureaucratic business of rule—are Mathur’s site. Her nominal focus is the implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), a massive social welfare scheme designed to provide a fixed term of employment for all impoverished residents of rural India. Yet rather than seek to characterize NREGA as a success or a failure, Mathur uses it as a window onto the everyday social relations that constitute the state. To do so, she engages a set of challenging dynamics for understanding the politics of administration: the ways that imagining Gopeshwar as a remote area shapes administrative affects for the government officials 431 American Ethnologist ! Volume 45 Number 3 August 2018 posted there; the daily production of what she calls the state life of law through files and copious documentation; the links between projects seeking to make NREGA transparent and the apparent impossibility of implementing it; the genres, techniques, and forms of official letter writing (a key dynamic of documentation for the Indian state); and the social dynamics of official meetings. Similar themes and dynamics have been explored elsewhere by anthropologists and others seeking to elaborate the social life of bureaucracy. However, rather than rehearse old arguments, Mathur marshals her rich ethnography to push beyond an impasse in much of the literature on state formation. Paper Tiger does not simply outline the failures or breakdowns of state administration. It takes on the challenge of thinking more dynamically about state development projects. Rejecting existing frameworks such as structural violence, Mathur critically engages the concepts of sarkar and sarkari (Hindi for government and governmental, respectively). As she usefully points out, these terms have complicated and multiple valences— encapsulating at once a concrete notion of government and a pejorative or cynical critique of governmental failure. Instead of concluding that development is a mere performance of state power, Mathur pushes us to hold in tension the often very concrete failures of state development work with the very material processes and social relations that constitute administration. This double sense of sarkar is critical to understanding the puzzles of the Indian state. On the one hand, state officials are constantly engaged in the material production of state power through the generation of copious amounts of documentation on paper. On the other hand, the paperness of government often does not correspond to real or concrete outcomes or the implementation of projects on the ground. This is precisely the paper tiger of the book’s title, a critique suggesting something that seems powerful but is, in practice, ineffectual. Yet Mathur urges us to think of this noncorrespondence not as the outcome of bad faith or ill intentions. Rather, “we need to understand the intimate, complex, and context-dependent entanglement of the sarkari and the real” (170). In doing so, she critically nuances the ways we might think about state power not only as a performance of domination but also as a set of lived negotiations and relationships between “state” life and “real” life. This insight is an important contribution to how we might think about the dilemmas and limits of what Philip Abrams famously called politically organized subjection. Mathur shows that the space that seems to open between the paper and the real is one in which new understandings of the state in everyday life are worked out. This is most apparent in her outstanding final chapter, where she shifts her focus from NREGA to a series of leopard attacks that plagued Gopeshwar for more than two months while she 432 was conducting fieldwork. The presence of a real bagh (Hindi for both leopard and tiger), which mauled and killed a number of people from the start of the outbreak to the moment when it was finally hunted down, dramatizes what is at stake in the paperness—the paper tiger—of the state. The interminable wait suffered by residents of Gopeshwar and the surrounding region, Mathur demonstrates, needs to be understood multiply. On the one hand, the wait itself emerges out of a “complex concatenation of different forms of social time, material practices, and legal assemblages” (142). On the other, the wait and its lethal consequences served as a moment for residents to (re)formulate their own critiques of the power of the paper state. Mathur’s analysis is both keen and nuanced. Her work asks us to engage the state simultaneously in multiple ways and through different perspectives. She offers both a powerful critique of apparent state failures and a rich ethnography of the relational and grounded material practices that make it often impossible to implement state policies. Elegantly written and rigorously argued, Paper Tiger pushes us away from normative understandings of administration and exposes the need for more empirical engagements with the articulations among law, development, and implementation. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment: Oral Narratives from the Central Himalayas. Aditya Malik. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 320 pp. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12688 SANJAY JOSHI Northern Arizona University In Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment, Aditya Malik brings together the study of two kinds of ritual or religious practices from the region of Kumaon in the Central Himalayas. He looks at written petitions to Goludev, the local god of justice, and at the phenomenon of jāgar, often glossed as “possession.” Brought together, the two sets of religious practices allow him to engage with a range of scholarly debates across many disciplines, among them discussions of the nature of self and alterity as well as the concept of justice, agency, and of course possession. It is his engagement with these debates and with a variety of (mostly Western) scholars that ties together the study of what are otherwise often distinct modes of worship in Kumaon. The book is divided roughly in half—Goludev worship, then jāgar or possession—followed by an epilogue. Rather than universalizing a post-Enlightenment subject, Malik highlights the importance of powers higher than oneself in