In this interview, Maira Hayat reflects on her ethnographic and theoretical engagements with bureaucrats and their everyday practices within Punjab’s irrigation department, which manages the world’s largest canal-irrigation infrastructure. In her accompanying article, Hayat’s approach shifts attention away from viewing bureaucracy solely as a site of power and structural violence, instead examining bureaucratic work through the lens of ethical labor. She illustrates how ethics derived from vernacular registers and Islamic teachings inform and shape the daily practices and functioning of bureaucracy. Her work offers nuanced insights into how ethical frameworks intersect bureaucratic processes, revealing moments of friction, negotiation, and potential transformation.

In the following conversation, Hayat delves into the delicate task of maintaining balance while ethnographically navigating the distinctions between “good” and “bad” bureaucrats/bureaucratic practices, while remaining mindful of power dynamics at play and the researcher’s own positionality.

Jay Sharma (JS): This article presents a compelling critique of stereotypical Islamophobic depictions, emphasizing how Islamic practices are deeply situated and can foster ethical labor that disrupts bureaucratic violence. However, I wonder: what guidance might you offer to early-career anthropologists grappling with the realization that not all vernacular or ethical frameworks employed by bureaucrats are inclusive or just? Such frameworks often perpetuate hierarchies or reinforce dominant ideologies. For instance, in my fieldwork in India, I observed lower-level bureaucrats frequently invoking the trope of tribal primitivity and caste hierarchy to exclude marginalized groups and deny them access to state welfare benefits.

Maira Hayat (MH): It was instructive for me to attend to when caste references were invoked: in what kinds of situations, exchanges, or “cases?” And I think this has specific importance in a bureaucratic setting like mine where the structuring laws, manuals, policies, and texts etc., are written in language such as: water users, occupiers and owners of land, canal officers, etc. There is nothing, officially on paper, that makes someone’s caste legible in an Irrigation office—and yet of course it would come up. When, exactly and specifically, is recourse had to caste tropes and by whom? Does everyone support such invocations or might one bureaucrat be challenged by colleagues?

With the drainage survey incident, it helped me to ask why Saleem sahib even tried to hide what he was doing. That was contrary to my expectations: the expectation, the assumption, was that anti-Ahmadiyya sentiment would be universal among lover-level bureaucrats. Every person I discussed the incident with—friends family colleagues—was surprised that others didn’t think like and agree with Saleem sahib. There is a strong class dimension to these assumptions: less educated, lower-level employees are more likely to be bigoted in particular ways. I say this without denying the reality of anti-Ahmadiyya violence. What struck me about this particular incident was recourse was had to other logics and guides, that other guides were available: “merit,” matters that are daftari and qanooni, and hence shouldn’t raise the question of if someone is Ahmadiyya. Without denying the violence structuring a world, I think there is much to be learnt from attending to how those violent worlds are made and also unmade. The work of reproduction sustains those worlds—where does that work happen, who does it willingly or grudgingly, in what idioms and using which frames, what are competing idioms and frames, what possibilities open up in this multiplicity, this friction?

JS: Tessa Lea, in her article “Desiring Bureaucracy,” (2021) published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, argues that anthropological critiques of bureaucracy often imply a longing for something better—a more ethical and functional system. At the same time, she recognizes bureaucracy as a powerful site that holds latent potential for both violence and oppression, as well as justice and equality. Have you encountered a similar ambivalence in your work? If so, how do you ethnographically navigate the often-overlapping boundaries between good and bad bureaucratic practices or bureaucrats?

MH: I found it very instructive to take seriously when my interlocutors—and people in and out of those offices—made declarations of good and bad officers, resolutions, characters, situations. How were those decisions made? Were they just about immediate, proximate situations? What notions of ideals/ideal-types anchored them? Were they built on longer relations and exchanges and histories of relations, whether with the department or with a particular bureaucrat? Given my mode of work as an ethnographer one of my primary ‘sites,’ as well as points of entry, is the language that is being used and the reasoning employed—what they said to me, to each other, to other people, how they reacted to my language, who contradicted whom when and why, and who offered what instead and when? Of course also much is never made explicit, and so ethnographers try to get a better sense of places and people and situations in so many ways—we try to become attuned to ways and means of relating, to the stakes in particular modes of relating—through, as just one example, the longevity of our participation and presence in our research areas.

I pay a lot of attention to corruption in the book project (from which the article draws). I take it seriously, unlike what I perceive to be a tendency in the discipline to apologize for it, to explain it away. I am of course not suggesting we accept everything that is said—most of us in the field don’t just listen passively and accept and note it down, but there is dialogue, back and forth, disagreement. We make our own sense of what we see, hear, and what is told to us. With some of my interlocutors, after years of research, I was having long, heated debates. I think that is tied to questions of positionality too—who feels comfortable commenting on what? Who is invested enough in which debates and conversations? When does an ethnographer ‘exit’ an exchange—for example, when will I say, “Oh I think I have enough for my argument, for my article or for my chapter, and that’s that?”

‘Longing’ is an interesting word here—I am not sure how I feel about it. But I do argue that state bureaucracies are extremely important sites to theorize the political and ethical. Who is administering a public good? Is it being administered as such? This is not ‘only’ a policy question, it is I think a fundamental political question with wide-ranging implications. In my case for example we’re talking about one of the world’s largest irrigation infrastructure networks supporting a predominantly agricultural economy—that’s a lot of livelihood and access to water at stake in how this bureaucracy functions.

JS: This question builds on my earlier one regarding how to ethnographically study bureaucrats. While bureaucracy as a site may be inherently susceptible to both good and bad practices, individual bureaucrats themselves might shift between legal/illegal, good/bad, or ethical/unethical actions depending on the specific context, as well as the identity and positionality of the actors involved. This raises an important question: how can one ethnographically trace and interpret the intentionality of bureaucrats in these fluid and situational dynamics?

MH: The question of intentionality makes sense to me in its entanglements with the language used, and with particular situations. Vernacular terms are important for they were pointing me to deeper, larger logics of, for instance, discriminating between.

Situational dynamics, especially in bureaucracies, readily present themselves as ‘cases.’ What types of cases are there? Which are the common ones? A case is an articulation of so much more than a single bureaucrat's designs, for example. Paying attention to such articulations in bureaucratic settings was something I did regularly (see Berlant 2007 for a very interesting analysis of the case; also Gluckman 1973).

It is also helpful to consider why a particular bureaucrat’s behavior surprises you. Is it because of what you expected or because of what they’ve led you to expect from them in similar situations? So then we can see how that situation is different, or what else may have shifted.

JS: While studying the state and bureaucracy, the positionality of the researcher—shaped by factors such as gender, caste, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality—becomes crucial, as it influences how we navigate the field and the kinds of interactions and responses we have. What insights can you share from your own research experiences regarding how your positionality shaped your fieldwork?

MH: That I was in an overwhelmingly male setting most of the time made me think about dress and appearance to a degree I hadn’t envisioned, and that I resented. The way I spoke—my Punjabi and Urdu accents—were all inseparable from my status as a graduate student in the United States, from my upper-class urban Lahori location. I write about this in a book chapter titled, “The Gender of Corruption,” where I am describing a bodily sense of corruption. Many of my interlocutors were Lahoris just like myself—and yet our Lahores barely connected. They were such distant cartographies. My access to a car also made me useful, in that organizing a routine official field visit can be a big expense for a nehri patwari (lowest tier of revenue wing in the Irrigation bureaucracy) especially if he doesn’t have his own car (and most patwari did not). A major chunk of my research grant went to transport—paying for car rentals for field visits for five to six irrigation officials at a time.

I also write in the book about a category I was slotted into and that irked me, “the World Bank madam.” But that slot made perfect sense for someone like me I soon realized: upper class English-speaking females who come on specific projects to gather data and then disappear, and publish something no one ever gets to read or is invited to comment on. Funnily enough I was doing fieldwork at the same time as some ‘actual’ World Bank madams and when I tried making contact, I had limited success. The team’s data collection work ended up being assigned to the lower levels of the bureaucracy, many of whom were my interlocutors. So I ended up doing data collection for the team with Irrigation officials traveling in vehicles I was arranging and funding from my research grants!

JS: We find ourselves in the midst of multiple crises—political, economic, environmental, and social conflicts. Drawing from your own fieldwork, what advice would you offer to early-career anthropologists, particularly when navigating the delicate balance of engaging with powerful actors like the state or bureaucracy, while simultaneously working with marginalized communities?

MH: If I were to say we—me and my interlocutors—were brought together by a shared concern for and a shared reality of a ‘water crisis,’ it wouldn’t be entirely true since the immediate crisis for many of my interlocutors was their mode of work, their salaries, their promotions, and contract terms. There was something far away about the ‘water crisis’ from some of the everyday Irrigation bureaucratic settings. But there were other senses of crisis that were hyper-magnified: for example ‘interference’ in bureaucratic work and growing digitization and concerns about bureaucrats’ disposability. This distance or discrepancy has helped me conceptualize the materiality of water better I think (and hope), made me question my initial eagerness to “follow the water,” and led me to appreciate the “work of water” (my book title).

As I was finalizing my book manuscript and close to sending it to presses, devastating floods occurred in Pakistan. I wrote a piece in The Washington Post (2022), reactions to which have been so informative. Most of my Pakistan-based interlocutors (governmental, as well as those who are part of the non-governmental environmental management and advocacy world) responded with a version of: “Yeah sure, but it’s low-hanging fruit, this pointing fingers at the global North. What’s our own government done?” That troubled me, troubles me, and I’m trying to better understand why these powerful state critiques are impatient with critiques trying to place Pakistan within global circuits of expertise and resource development, and to what effect. Is there a growing impatience with histories of material connection and co-production as critique?