Martínez and Sirri’s article offers a subtle and richly ethnographic account of how the state is produced and experienced through everyday practice. Rather than treating the state as an abstract institutional structure or a set of formal rules, the authors show how it is continually enacted by people whose work brings them into direct contact with citizens. Through an innovative comparison of subsidised bread bakers and soldiers in Amman and Baghdad, they demonstrate that the state—like bread—is not simply the product of written recipes or regulations, but of practical knowledge cultivated through long-term experience. This “bureaucraft” enables state actors to know how to respond to situations that cannot be reduced to bureaucratic procedures alone.
The article’s comparative perspective is particularly compelling. Bakers and soldiers alike perform the state, yet they do so in profoundly different ways. Bakers produce the bread that sustains everyday life, while soldiers embody the state’s capacity for coercion and violence. By juxtaposing these two forms of state-making, Martínez and Sirri illuminate the tensions and contradictions inherent in state power, revealing how care, service, authority and violence are intertwined in the ordinary workings of governance.
Although the article introduces the concept of bureaucraft, its greatest contribution lies not in proposing a new theoretical vocabulary, but in its exceptionally nuanced ethnographic demonstration of how the state emerges through mundane encounters and embodied practice. It reminds us that the same commitment to serving the public and performing one’s duties well can generate both reassuring and deeply troubling effects. In doing so, the article exemplifies the kind of empirically grounded, theoretically insightful scholarship that continues to shape the anthropology of the state.
We warmly congratulate José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri on receiving the inaugural AnthroState Best Article Award.
Citation: Martínez, José Ciro, and Omar Sirri. 2023. “Bureaucraft: Statemakers in Amman and Baghdad.” Cultural Anthropology 38 (3). https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.3.04