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Bureaucratic Speech: Language Choice and Democratic Identity in the Taipei Bureaucracy
Author(s) -
Bernstein Anya
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12203
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , legitimation , democracy , sociology , government (linguistics) , ideology , political science , public administration , political economy , politics , law , linguistics , philosophy
This article illuminates the social nature of bureaucratic practice by analyzing the everyday speech of bureaucrats in a polyglossic society. My ethnographic analysis shows how Taipei city government administrators mobilize ideologies associated with Taiwan's two primary languages, and stereotypes associated with bureaucracy, to undermine both. Instead, they present themselves as a postethnonational and postbureaucratic avant‐garde of their new democracy. In doing so, they draw on local values and tropes of legitimation, which place a premium on the personalistic relations and social imbrication of government actors—relations that democracy, for all its potential to spawn dangerous chaos, is seen to facilitate. They represent their government employer not by claiming a superordinate status for it but by situating it as one participant within a complex of institutions, networks, and values. In illuminating both the internally and the externally social nature of government bureaucracy, I highlight the creative and progressive possibilities hidden within the drab government office.