Documents

Sophisticated and provocative. The original and unique focus of this volume effectively opens up a new arena of critique that will move ethnography and qualitative inquiry forward in a way that few other works do."
―George Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University

"This edited collection asks how an understanding of documentary forms sheds light on the creation and circulation of modern forms of knowledge, expertise, and governance. This is a major intervention in how we understand the everyday practice and techne of the documentary impulse and documentary apparatuses of law, bureaucratic review, and other institutions of modernity, as well as linguistic anthropology, literary theory, and law. The topic of Documents is not just of interest because of epistemological quandaries in the human sciences over textualization and interpretation, but also because the domains to which we increasingly turn our attention are themselves auto-documentary."
―William M. Maurer, Chair and Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine