Maira Hayat
Biographic Data
| ID | 139047 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maira Hayat |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maira |
| FAMILY NAME | Hayat |
| SIGNATURE | HAYAT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0170-5742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
With and Against Absurdity
This afterword joins the special issue in thinking with absurdity rather than making sense of it. Across fake latrines, ghost railway jobs, suspended migrants, futile hospital care, techno roundabouts and Cuban ostriches, absurdity emerges less as a concept than a condition: trap, tactic, performance, survival. It compels engagement where bullshit thrives on indifference, showing how power governs not despite absurdity but through it. Rather than…
Unhoused
Unhoused is a composite fieldwork document—drawn, written, layered—that emerged through collaboration between cartoonist Mana Neyestani and anthropologist Mirco Göpfert. What began as a series of interviews, drawing lessons and message exchanges gradually evolved into something less easily classifiable: a joint attempt to trace how displacement unsettles not only bodies and homes, but also narrative, memory, and authorship itself. The resulting w…
The Duty of Water: Land, Labour, and the Racialisation of Waste in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab
In our present changing climate, water governance is fast becoming a matter of concern everywhere, but especially in the Global South, which has long been the object of (mis)understandings of state failure and dysfunction. A common characterisation of “bad” water governance calls attention to the waste of water. In this article I show how contemporary development discourse and practice around the waste of water articulate conceptions of bureaucra…
Dissonance: Cartooning in Iran, Humor, and the Study of Things That Don't Match
This essay, drawing on research with cartoonists in Iran, explores cartooning as a distinctive mode of engaged knowing through drawing and humor. By unraveling the cartoonists' capacity to perceive, compose, and amplify dissonance, the study reveals a practice that intertwines perceptive sensitivity, analytical skill, and moral commitment. Embracing dissonance through cartooning and humor not only provides new perspectives on the political presen…
Good Bureaucrats and God: The Ethical Labor of the Public
Bureaucracies are typically studied for lessons in structural violence, anti-politics, failures of law, and as foils to the ethical. I, however, argue that they constitute uniquely important sites to theorize the ethical. Conceptualizing ethical labor as a modality of everyday bureaucratic work, I examine this labor as it enrolls law, God, and vernaculars of work, and takes the form of public-private distinction-making. The article expands the an…
Storage as security: Damming water in Pakistan
On dictators and clowns
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin, with a penchant for absurdly long tables and known as a bare-chested horseman and bear tamer, deployed a massive army to invade Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, dancer and actor, who has demonstrated hitherto unimaginable leadership skills. Our political present is grotesque. Politicians erupt as caricatures of themselves, and comedians win elections. Satirical late-night productions outp…
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
Empire's accidents: Law, lies, and sovereignty in the "war on terror" in Pakistan
This essay tracks the relationship between the legal and the lethal in the Central Intelligence Agency's operations in Pakistan as part of the U.S.-led war on terror. I juxtapose an account of an automobile accident in Lahore on 26 January 2011 involving the Blackwater employee, Raymond Davis, with a drone strike in the North Waziristan Agency in Pakistan's (former) Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the day after Davis was released by a…
The Bureaucrat's Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan's Punjab, the country's agricultural heartland and home to the world's largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti-corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials' efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and r…
Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
Plumbing the Depths in Lahore
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
Travelling police: The potential for change in the wake of police reform in West Africa
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
Körling, Gabriella: In Search of the State. An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
Anthropos , Seite 333 - 334
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
The Bureaucrat's Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan's Punjab, the country's agricultural heartland and home to the world's largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti-corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials' efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and r…
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Empire's accidents: Law, lies, and sovereignty in the "war on terror" in Pakistan
This essay tracks the relationship between the legal and the lethal in the Central Intelligence Agency's operations in Pakistan as part of the U.S.-led war on terror. I juxtapose an account of an automobile accident in Lahore on 26 January 2011 involving the Blackwater employee, Raymond Davis, with a drone strike in the North Waziristan Agency in Pakistan's (former) Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the day after Davis was released by a…
Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
The Duty of Water: Land, Labour, and the Racialisation of Waste in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab
In our present changing climate, water governance is fast becoming a matter of concern everywhere, but especially in the Global South, which has long been the object of (mis)understandings of state failure and dysfunction. A common characterisation of “bad” water governance calls attention to the waste of water. In this article I show how contemporary development discourse and practice around the waste of water articulate conceptions of bureaucra…
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Security in Niamey: An anthropological perspective on policing and an act of terrorism in Niger
The abduction of two Frenchmen in January 2011 in Niamey's supposedly most secure neighbourhood has led many to question the functioning of the city's security apparatus. This paper analyses Niamey's security landscape, initially from an historical and then from a spatial perspective. It argues that for a comprehensive analysis of security, we must first decentre our perspective on security construction, and thus take informal non-organised modes…
Körling, Gabriella: In Search of the State. An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
Anthropos , Seite 333 - 334
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa: Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Bureaucratic aesthetics: Report writing in the Nigérien gendarmerie
Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes' socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and o…
Travelling police: The potential for change in the wake of police reform in West Africa
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie
Sometimes it just seems wrong (or too much work) to enforce the law à la lettre. Then police officers may either turn a blind eye to particular situations or give you a warning instead of a ticket. The gendarmes in Niger do that as well, and they call this in Hausa 'gyara', meaning 'repair'. Taking seriously the gendarmes' perspective, their search for justice, as well as this notion of repair, I propose a little anthropological twist: it is not …
Surveillance in Niger: "Gendarmes and the Problem of "Seeing Things
Today, high-tech surveillance seems omnipresent in Niger, particularly because of the conflicts in neighboring Mali, Libya, and Nigeria and efforts by the U.S. and France to boost local security agencies. However, Niger is not a very efficient "registering machine," and the gendarmes have very limited knowledge of the communities in which they work. The key to overcoming this problem of knowledge-to "see things," as the gendarmes put it-is the nu…
Plumbing the Depths in Lahore
Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the …
Empire's accidents: Law, lies, and sovereignty in the "war on terror" in Pakistan
This essay tracks the relationship between the legal and the lethal in the Central Intelligence Agency's operations in Pakistan as part of the U.S.-led war on terror. I juxtapose an account of an automobile accident in Lahore on 26 January 2011 involving the Blackwater employee, Raymond Davis, with a drone strike in the North Waziristan Agency in Pakistan's (former) Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the day after Davis was released by a…
The Bureaucrat's Wage: (De)Valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy
Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan's Punjab, the country's agricultural heartland and home to the world's largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti-corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials' efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and r…
Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer's will to know
As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian…
Storage as security: Damming water in Pakistan
On dictators and clowns
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin, with a penchant for absurdly long tables and known as a bare-chested horseman and bear tamer, deployed a massive army to invade Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, dancer and actor, who has demonstrated hitherto unimaginable leadership skills. Our political present is grotesque. Politicians erupt as caricatures of themselves, and comedians win elections. Satirical late-night productions outp…
The Duty of Water: Land, Labour, and the Racialisation of Waste in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab
In our present changing climate, water governance is fast becoming a matter of concern everywhere, but especially in the Global South, which has long been the object of (mis)understandings of state failure and dysfunction. A common characterisation of “bad” water governance calls attention to the waste of water. In this article I show how contemporary development discourse and practice around the waste of water articulate conceptions of bureaucra…
Dissonance: Cartooning in Iran, Humor, and the Study of Things That Don't Match
This essay, drawing on research with cartoonists in Iran, explores cartooning as a distinctive mode of engaged knowing through drawing and humor. By unraveling the cartoonists' capacity to perceive, compose, and amplify dissonance, the study reveals a practice that intertwines perceptive sensitivity, analytical skill, and moral commitment. Embracing dissonance through cartooning and humor not only provides new perspectives on the political presen…
Good Bureaucrats and God: The Ethical Labor of the Public
Bureaucracies are typically studied for lessons in structural violence, anti-politics, failures of law, and as foils to the ethical. I, however, argue that they constitute uniquely important sites to theorize the ethical. Conceptualizing ethical labor as a modality of everyday bureaucratic work, I examine this labor as it enrolls law, God, and vernaculars of work, and takes the form of public-private distinction-making. The article expands the an…
With and Against Absurdity
This afterword joins the special issue in thinking with absurdity rather than making sense of it. Across fake latrines, ghost railway jobs, suspended migrants, futile hospital care, techno roundabouts and Cuban ostriches, absurdity emerges less as a concept than a condition: trap, tactic, performance, survival. It compels engagement where bullshit thrives on indifference, showing how power governs not despite absurdity but through it. Rather than…
Unhoused
Unhoused is a composite fieldwork document—drawn, written, layered—that emerged through collaboration between cartoonist Mana Neyestani and anthropologist Mirco Göpfert. What began as a series of interviews, drawing lessons and message exchanges gradually evolved into something less easily classifiable: a joint attempt to trace how displacement unsettles not only bodies and homes, but also narrative, memory, and authorship itself. The resulting w…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Economics (4 works) · Ethnography (4 works)