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Article ID: CBB977849662

Bureaucracy as Knowledge (2020)

Felten, Sebastian (Author)
Oertzen, Christine von (Author)

Journal for the History of Knowledge
Volume: 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 8, pp. 1-16

DOI: 10.5334/jhk.18

URI: http://journalhistoryknowledge.org/articles/10.5334/jhk.18/

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In this introduction we explain the overall approach taken in this special issue. It is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire. We show, firstly, how bureaucracy has worked as a term of critique and how, in fin-de-siècle Europe, it became an analytical concept used for world-historical comparison with a strong Western bias. Against this background, we then develop our group’s new approach to analyzing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term “bureaucracy as knowledge.” This approach builds on the history of science and technology and aims to recover actors’ ways of organizing social and material worlds rather than judge them by modernist, Western standards. Third, we discuss if there is such a thing as “bureaucratic knowledge” sui generis and, based on the experience of our authors, suggest ways of studying plural knowledges that cut across different domains. Finally, we argue that historical bureaucracies merit close investigation because they have demonstrated the power to both make and break social and material worlds. The approach proposed in this issue can therefore help make better sense of the dynamics by which bureaucracies exert such power in situations otherwise studied by political, cultural, and social historians. This introduction is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

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Includes Series Articles

Article Theodore Porter (2020) Revenge of the Humdrum: Bureaucracy as Profession and as a Site of Science. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 18). unapi

Article Anna Echterhölter (2020) Shells and Order: Questionnaires on Indigenous Law in German New Guinea. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 17). unapi

Article Kathryn M. Olesko (2020) The Indaganda Survey of the Prussian Frontier: The Built World, Logistical Power, and Bureaucratic Knowledge in the Polish Partitions, 1772–1806. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 16). unapi

Article Maura Dykstra (2020) A Crisis of Competence: Information, Corruption, and Knowledge about the Decline of the Qing State. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 15). unapi

Article Sebastian Felten (2020) Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 14). unapi

Article Harun Küçük (2020) The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 13). unapi

Article Susanne Friedrich (2020) Caveat from the Archive: Pieter van Dam’s Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie and Crisis Management. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 12). unapi

Article Renée Raphael (2020) In Pursuit of “Useful” Knowledge: Documenting Technical Innovation in Sixteenth-Century Potosí. Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 11). unapi

Article John Sabapathy (2020) Making Public Knowledge—Making Knowledge Public: The Territorial, Reparative, Heretical, and Canonization Inquiries of Gui Foucois (ca. 1200–1268). Journal for the History of Knowledge (p. 10). unapi

Article Sixiang Wang (2020) Chosŏn’s Office of Interpreters: The Apt Response and the Knowledge Culture of Diplomacy. Journal for the History of Knowledge. unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB977849662/

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