Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

The final revisions of this special issue came together amid holiday travels and the UK's latest bureaucratic experiment: a wholesale switch from physical immigration documents to a digital-only system. As of October 2024, the government began phasing out physical residence permits (biometric residence permits, BRPs) in favour of eVisas, trumpeting the new system as loss-proof and damage-resistant. Yet many residents found themselves in a Kafkaesque maze: their physical permits expired, their eVisa profiles inaccessible due to technical glitches, and their right to work, rent, or even remain in the UK suddenly hanging by a digital thread. The government's contradictory guidance – instructing people to print their eVisa profiles while simultaneously declaring that printed documents would not count as valid proof of status – only deepened the confusion. One of us, caught in this web, found herself longing for the very physical documents we once anxiously guarded against losing, while navigating the very real possibility of being stranded by confused airline staff unable to verify digital immigration status.

Drawing on scholarly discussions on bureaucracy and the anthropology of the state as a relational setting, alongside scholarship that positions affect as central to understanding the political realm, this special issue examines the state as a simultaneous focal point of affective and imaginative investment. We do so by looking at how a variety of documents – whether produced, concealed, kept on hold, discarded, recycled, demanded, missed, lost, found, or circulated within and beyond public and private bureaucracies – both crystallise and evoke (non)citizens’ imaginings of the state and affective investments in it. Expanding their ethnographic scope beyond state bureaucracies, the articles in this special issue offer ethnographically nuanced accounts of how the non-linear workings of private and public bureaucracies – and their ambiguous relations to the state and their fragmented temporalities – create political, affective, temporal and imaginative reorientations in both bureaucrats and (non)citizens vis-à-vis states. We show how affects and imaginings of the state typically emerge from ‘bureaucratic impasses’: temporary stalemates in which both users and bureaucrats strive to understand and interpret, adjust and attune to bureaucratic rules and demands.

This article explores how residents of La Petite Sicile, a low-income neighbourhood of Tunis, developed affective and temporal dispositions to the post-revolutionary state through interactions with property documents at times of eviction risk. The neighbourhood underwent evictions during the Ben Ali dictatorship, threats which rematerialised in the post-revolutionary period, throwing inhabitants into states of unease and discontent towards the political situation. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tunis (2014–2016), this article traces the affective genealogies of documents produced to testify to residents’ housing rights in La Petite Sicile. In presenting an approach to legal documentation as repositories of political affectivities in the post-revolutionary period, it highlights how the intersection between urban changes, materiality and political/moral affects complicates facile narratives of democratic transition.

Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with state officials implementing a development programme for Indigenous farmers in southern Chile, I show how anxieties are generated in a context of increased accountability and labour precarity and how the materiality of bureaucracy plays a role in this process. By showing how state officials hired under flexible fixed-term contracts deal with documents and signatures, I challenge the notion of the indifferent bureaucrat. Rather than portraying state officials as disinterested or indifferent, I illustrate how those in unstable job positions depend on generating an official paper trail to secure ongoing employment. Ethnographically, the article highlights the affective dimensions of bureaucratic practices, emphasising how the pressure to meet deadlines and ensure the timely validation of documents produces anxiety, and shapes the everyday experiences and futures of these officials.

In this article, I explore the incremental bureaucratisation of a grassroots, self-organised medical facility (KIA) in austerity-ridden Athens, focusing ethnographically on the conflicting affects it triggers in both prospective patients and the volunteers-turned-bureaucrats. Through detailed ethnographic vignettes, I discuss how the volunteers attempt to circumvent the bureaucratic rules they put in place by engaging in small acts of bureaucratic subversion. I argue that the volunteers often bend these rules and protocols to realign their politics and morality: while the KIA grants access to resources and services to those able to provide the necessary documents, both volunteers and prospective patients appeal to a shared sense of humanity (anthropia) to negotiate and compensate for missing paperwork. By unravelling emic interpretations of humanity and examining the affective and imaginative dispositions that paperwork and documents – and their absence – evoke, I expose the dual nature of bureaucracy. On the one hand, it functions as a ‘hope-generating machine’, embodying utopian values for the volunteers. On the other hand, it amplifies socio-medical inequalities, re-creating the state's presence within a volunteer organisation.

For decades, Iran deployed male refugees from Afghanistan to fight against Iraq (1980–1988) and the Islamic State in Syria (2011–2024). Many of them returned disabled. Navigating their ambiguous status as refugees-turned-disabled veterans, Afghans blend discourses of sacrifice and pan-Shi'a solidarity to contest the exclusionary practices of Iran's state care bureaucracy. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Iran, this article examines how Afghans’ care negotiations forge an intimate attachment to the sovereign state. I argue that this attachment, mediated through documents, creates a sense of intimacy while evoking suspicion towards the state. In doing so, this article attends to the affective life of documents amid regional conflicts and protracted displacement, where desires for state care are woven into enduring transnational and sovereign histories of violence.

Digital technologies are a central force animating recent multimodal explorations in anthropology. Although promises of novel modes of expression based on the digital abound – and I would intimate that they are still to be fulfilled – these technologies have profound effects on anthropological practice beyond the domain of representation. This article hints at such wider transformations by reviewing three ethnographic projects that share a common trait: their fieldwork is supported and carried out through digital infrastructures that have broad effects on the activities of analysis, representation, and conceptualisation.