Brendan Donegan (Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS)
Marginal notes, truth, and power: Mapping document careers in the Community-based Monitoring of Health Services scheme, India
This paper analyses the Community-based Monitoring of Health Services scheme, a programme initiated by the Government of India in 2007 in collaboration with a network of activists, the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (People’s Health Movement). Central to this programme was the active participation of community members in the collection of data on healthcare provision at village, block and district level using questionnaires designed by the activists. This data was used to hold government officials to account in public hearings, resulting in some changes at local level. However, scrawled in the margins of the completed questionnaire forms and articulated in the public hearings are fragments of highly specific and local truths about power. Ultimately these marginal notes are passed over by activists and government officials who are only willing and able to work with data that is disembedded from local networks of power.
A decade ago, Richard Harper suggested that we might use the notion of a document career as a prism through which to describe and analyse the working mechanisms of institutions and organisations. Drawing on Harper’s approach, this paper examines the politics of the programme by following the translations of the documents at its heart as they travel between public and private spaces, engaging with some political struggles and bypassing others, and speaking truth to power while maintaining the necessary fiction of a clear distinction between the two. The analysis concludes by examining the document’s transformation in the pages of the ethnographer’s description. Here too there is politics in the range of opposing expectations of the document, for example, from government officers and activists concerned about misrepresentation, NGO professionals demanding analysis with relevance for their future activities, donor agency managers seeking ‘findings’ that justify their future plans, and academics concerned with accusations of unethical research.
Brendan Donegan is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. He has an MPhil in Anthropology from SOAS and an MA in Political Science from the University of Warwick, UK. His research explores state-civil society relationships in contemporary India, focusing on the implications and effects of the spaces for state-civil society partnership and consultation that have opened up in recent years. His PhD takes the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (People’s Health Movement-India), a nation-wide network of social activists and NGOs working on health issues, as a case study of these processes.
A decade ago, Richard Harper suggested that we might use the notion of a document career as a prism through which to describe and analyse the working mechanisms of institutions and organisations. Drawing on Harper’s approach, this paper examines the politics of the programme by following the translations of the documents at its heart as they travel between public and private spaces, engaging with some political struggles and bypassing others, and speaking truth to power while maintaining the necessary fiction of a clear distinction between the two. The analysis concludes by examining the document’s transformation in the pages of the ethnographer’s description. Here too there is politics in the range of opposing expectations of the document, for example, from government officers and activists concerned about misrepresentation, NGO professionals demanding analysis with relevance for their future activities, donor agency managers seeking ‘findings’ that justify their future plans, and academics concerned with accusations of unethical research.
Brendan Donegan is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. He has an MPhil in Anthropology from SOAS and an MA in Political Science from the University of Warwick, UK. His research explores state-civil society relationships in contemporary India, focusing on the implications and effects of the spaces for state-civil society partnership and consultation that have opened up in recent years. His PhD takes the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (People’s Health Movement-India), a nation-wide network of social activists and NGOs working on health issues, as a case study of these processes.
