On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Bureaucratic paperwork seems to be self-evidently banal. But why does it matter that paperwork has this appearance? What work is banality doing? This article addresses these general questions by attending to three specific material qualities of banality in files from Myanmar's Supreme Court under military dictatorship, for the years 1992–1998: namely, their uniform typeface, frequent tabulation, and strenuous concatenation. Each has a corresponding value for bureaucracy: typeface connotes authority; tabulation, legibility; and concatenation, orderliness. Together these qualities permitted interventions into lives and events about which the court's judge-bureaucrats knew precious little. The files’ contents were banal so that uninformed, prompt, and more-or-less arbitrary decisions would be rendered easy and seemingly rational. Their banality at once enabled and occluded a distinctive brutality.

KEYWORDS:

• Paperwork
• materiality
• bureaucracy
• courts
• Burma
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Sophie Viravong and colleagues in the National Library of Australia, without whom the files that are the subject matter of this article would never have become an archive – not, at least, as we now know it. Thank you also to Bronwen Douglas and Christopher Ballard for the invitation to participate in the Material Encounters conference at the National Library, 4–6 February 2015, who gave me an opportunity to make good use of the files, and to audience members who asked questions on the paper presented. The paper was further improved via an anthropology workshop at the University of Michigan in March 2017. Thank you to the workshop participants and especially to Matthew Hull for his generosity in hosting that event, and to Matthew Schissler for his part in arranging it. Lastly, thank you to Bronwen and Chris as editors of this special issue and to Craig Reynolds and two anonymous referees for reading and commenting on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As the meetings were held fortnightly, the files obtained by the library constitute about 28% of the total number of files that would have been produced over this period.

2 Section 5 of the Judiciary Law 1988 stipulated that the Supreme Court ‘shall supervise the respective Courts’. Lacking a justice ministry or equivalent, this supervision was comprehensive.

3 All official notifications, orders, letters and files cited are in Burmese unless otherwise indicated.

4 The official typology for recording of the confidentiality of documents in Myanmar says as much: whereas ‘top secret’ material pertains to matters of national security, ‘secret’ material is designated with regard to the kind of documentation it is, and to the agencies responsible for its issuance (Revolutionary Council 1969, 5).

5 Notation here refers to comments or remarks that substantially add to or subtract from the text on the page, not merely underlining, ticking, or otherwise highlighting contents.

6 In a different mode of erasure from the omissions of the files themselves, one that goes to debates on the unanticipated afterlives and research ethics of archived materials (see Zeitlyn 2012), I have deleted from Figures 2 through 4 names and other identifying details of persons whose affairs are described on the pages reproduced.