The materiality of indeterminacy

I would like to thank the contributors and HAU for this symposium. It is a great privilege to receive such insightful and challenging comments, which have expanded and clarified my thinking on a range of fronts. I'll begin with the comment of Stephen Lyon and David Henig because they raise fundamental methodological questions. I am very pleased that they see my book as having significance for discussion of methods for studying organizations in relation to broader social terrains, particularly in Pakistan. They make two criticisms. The first is that I provided no methodological (as opposed to theoretical) justification for my approach. The book does attempt to develop a systematic method for the analysis of bureaucratic documentary practices in light of theories of semiotic anthropology and actor-network theory. But Lyon and Henig's focus is on the adequacy of my method for the study of the Pakistan bureaucracy and government politics. Here they are right that my justification was much less systematic. Nevertheless, I did articulate several reasons why a focus on documents is productive. First, the early Company documentary practices were extensive and evolved into what came to be known as the Document Raj, colonial precursor to the contemporary Pakistani bureaucracy. Second, Pakistan bureaucrats devote a large amount of effort to document production and circulation—and both bureaucrats and those who deal with the bureaucracy consider these practices consequential to the outcome of bureaucratic processes, in this case, the forms and social organization of the built environment. And third, it was my observation that virtually all activities involving bureaucrats and others are mediated by documents of some kind.