Government Analytics. Using Anthropological Methods

Abstract

This chapter aims to present an overview of how anthropologists study bureaucracy and why that approach has value to the World Bank and its interlocutors. Anthropologists are most commonly associated with immersive ethnographic methods, such as participatory observation. In this chapter, we describe those methods and their usefulness, but we also highlight the heterogeneity of the empirical materials that anthropologists draw upon. The chapter makes the case that, while the ethnographic approach of anthropologists might sometimes be perceived as “messy” or “unstructured,” in fact, the efforts of anthropologists are motivated by an abiding concern with empirical rigor—a refusal to ignore any sort of data or to content oneself with a single view of such a multifarious thing as bureaucracy. This is to say that an anthropological approach is a holistic one, which envisions bureaucracy as a rich, multidimensional world.