Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia

In Bogotá, urban planners employ the notion of juridical archaeology to describe the difficulties associated with the implementation of the city’s profuse and contradictory building regulations. They evoke a stratified and recalcitrant topography of decrees whose unpredictable effects are tied to the juxtapositions and gaps between sedimented legal artifacts. In practice, however, juridical archaeology holds great strategic value to bureaucratic operators, as it enables them to configure frameworks for urban development in a field of regulatory contingency. By representing the city’s legal system as an opaque and intricately layered terrain, bureaucrats and lawyers deflect EXCAVATING LEGAL LANDSCAPES 239 accountability, arguing that incoherence is to blame. Furthermore, they occlude their interpretative agency by claiming that they do not shape the meaning of the law, but merely excavate it from the city’s legal depths. I argue that juridical archaeology expands understandings of state reification, showing that bureaucratic disorder itself can be reified as a concrete amalgamation of incompatible parts and pieces. Furthermore, I qualify scholarly claims about the agency of bureaucratic artifacts through a more interactive approach to materiality that highlights the crucial roles of social meaning and practice. From this perspective, I focus on the ways in which actors materialize legal infrastructures in their everyday performances of bureaucratic expertise and authority. [city planning; law; bureaucracy; materiality; expertise] NOTES Acknowledgments I am grateful to my interlocutors in Bogotá and, in particular, to Juan Felipe Pinilla and Armando Lozano for sharing with me their critical insights into and deep understanding of the city’s planning laws. I thank Steven Caton, John Comaroff, Namita Dharia, Susan Fainstein, Alex Fattal, Michael Herzfeld, Matthew Hull, Jeffrey Kahn, Nick Smith, Ajantha Subramanian, Kimberly Theidon, Anand Vaidya, and the participants in the Harvard Political Anthropology Working Group and the “Paper Life of Politics” panel at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association for their valuable suggestions and inspiring conversations. Finally, my sincere gratitude to Cultural Anthropology’s anonymous reviewers, the editorial collective, and especially Cymene Howe for her generous and perceptive editorial guidance. The research on which this article is based was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. 1. Much like Michel Foucault’s (1972) archaeological analysis, the practice of juridical archaeology is oriented toward the present. But far from identifying a matrix of intelligibility (an episteme), juridical archaeologists combine and juxtapose fragments of the city’s juridico-spatial trajectories strategically. In so doing, they reify legal process as static assemblages of historical traces. A parallel problem in Foucault’s archaeology is the emphasis on ruptures and the lack of attention to processual temporalities. 2. I am referring, here, to Latourian understandings of assemblage that emphasize an expansive and symmetrical distribution of agency among humans and nonhumans, which typically remains invisible to social actors. In contrast, the practice of juridical archaeology calls attention to the intentional and conscious ways in which people interact with things and, most important, the mutual and constitutive relationship between humans and nonhumans, sociality and materiality (see Miller 2005). 3. While anthropological work has rarely focused directly on urban laws, a growing literature in legal geography has emphasized the distinctive complexities of the city as a legal space (Blomley 2013; see also Valverde 2012). My analysis parallels these critiques’ emphasis on the politics of legal spatializations through concepts such as jurisdiction and scale. 4. I view fetishism as a form of reification. In contrast to negative understandings of reification that conceive it as the passive objectification of social reality, I suggest here that it produces socially and political active things or fetishes. See Silva 2013 for a recent discussion of the analytical relationship between reification and fetishism. 5. In a critical review of Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper, Constantine Nakassis (2013, 403) defines materialization as the performative actualization of material qualities in social life and argues that “materiality is not ‘in’ anything at all, even if we often experience it as such; rather, it is a relationship across events of semiosis.” CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 31:2 240 6. Other institutional actors actively engaged in these disputes are oversight organizations such as the Bogotá Comptroller’s Office (Contralorı́a de Bogotá D.C.) and the local ombudsperson (Personerı́a de Bogotá D.C.). 7. The “thinging of the thing,” in Martin Heidegger’s (1971, 178) suggestive words, sets things apart from objects and calls for an understanding of their eventful and transformative nature. Tim Ingold (2012) elaborates on this distinction, arguing that objects are distant and readymade, while things are proximate and in an ongoing process of formation. I use thingified here in a similar vein to underline the interactive and mutually constitutive relationship between people and things. 8. Local governance in Bogotá has changed significantly since the 1980s with the introduction of the popular election of mayors (1986), the creation of a special statute to strengthen the city’s administrative apparatus (1993), and a national urban reform law (1998) giving cities greater planning powers. The Planning Department has gained prominence with these transformations. Although it is only one of the twelve administrative sectors that make up the city administration, it is responsible for the production of urban regulations and the creation of the administration’s government program (plan de desarrollo) and master plan (plan de ordenamiento). 9. In Bogotá, planning would be best described as a hybrid system (Salazar Ferro 2007) in which legalistic planning (planeamiento normativo) coexists with social-spatial approaches. Bureaucrats produce plans that are sanctioned as laws in the form of decrees (decretos), resolutions (resoluciones), or agreements (acuerdos). In this sense, planners work as lawmakers, continually codifying their expert assessments of urban transformation into legal instruments. The fact that most city-planning officials are architects by training is not irrelevant. It shapes their representations of the law, leading them to insist on an almost geometric legal logic in which urban laws and built forms are isomorphic. In this regard, a lawyer once mocked architects’ inflexibility by saying: “Architects are more Catholic than the pope!” 10. Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2005, 237) define the para-ethnographic as “the de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain as a way of dealing with contradiction, exception, [and] facts that are fugitive.” Javier had a keen ethnographic sensibility that allowed him (and me) to reflect on the sociocultural and political dimensions of planning technicalities. 11. Zoning laws now separated floor-area ratios (edificabilidad) from land uses (usos). 12. This trope represented a more direct acknowledgment of the agency of planners as the makers of legal monstrosities in their bureaucratic laboratories. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point. 13. In the local planning jargon, polygons referred to areas of varying size and shape (from individual plots to entire blocks or neighborhoods) that were marked out on city plans. 14. These categories were called treatments (tratamientos), and they established the basic conditions for the management of urban space: conservation referred to historic and architectural preservation laws, actualization established regulations for the redevelopment of constructed parcels, and development included guidelines for the development of empty lots. 15. In Spanish, urbanı́stico refers specifically to the expert and regulatory practices associated with urban planning. 16. Here, again, it is crucial to reconceptualize fetishism as a social practice. In contrast to understandings based on the Marxist commodity or on Freudian psychological displacements, my usage recovers the performative and ritualistic dimensions of the fetish found in classical anthropological theorizations. The key point here is that fetishism is not primarily an ideological category, in the sense of an unaware and mystified individual who is rendered passive by her or his misrecognition of an objectified reality. Rather, it is a transformative activity in which individuals are self-consciously engaged, albeit also entranced: in materializing certain social realities, individuals also become beholden to their power. EXCAVATING LEGAL LANDSCAPES 241 17. “Giving away the law” is a pervasive idiom among planners and perhaps the clearest example of the reification of the law: in this case, literally as a commodity that can be bargained with and exchanged.