ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the manner in which state idea is reproduced through mundane bureaucratic practices and ritual performances in Ethiopia. The bureaucratic practices in this chapter involve applications for identity cards, people’s experiences of waiting, bureaucrats’ strategies of making people wait, and practices of deferral and seclusion by local officials. The exploration of ritual performances focusses on how the practice of meetings contributes to the everyday production of the idea of the state through the display of hierarchies and pomp. Taking these two facets together, I argue that the state is not an object with a natural hierarchy but rather a product of practices that is brought into existence through a regularised set of interactions, encounters, and perpetual institutional rites that are ceaselessly performed and thereby durably institutionalised.
