Anger, Laughter, Compassion: The Emotional Labor of Bureaucrats in Gujarat’s Citizen Service Centers

• In Event: Embodied Labor and Laboring Bodies (Co-sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Abstract

Work on the ‘everyday state’ shows that citizens encounter the state as a sensory and affective regime—waiting, fatigue, humiliation—through which bureaucratic rules become lived realities (Auyero: 2012; Gupta: 2012; Navaro-Yashin: 2012; Fassin: 2015). I build on this insight by demonstrating how emotions are actively organized at the frontline through the embodied labor of bureaucratic officials. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in citizen service centers in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India), I examine how bureaucratic authority is produced through embodied emotional labor—voice, posture, gesture, tempo, and the orchestration of office atmospheres—alongside, and sometimes against, documentary proof (Hochschild: 1983; Warhurst and Nickson: 2007; Hull: 2012). Treating the center’s counter as a semi-scripted “stage” (Goffman: 1959), I conceptualize this space as a “natya”: a performance space in which officials and applicants contest what will count as “truth” in the interaction. Building on arguments that truth can function as a “final vocabulary” that stabilizes authority claims (Haugaard: 2012; Rorty: 1989), I show that such truth only “works” when it is successfully staged in the right emotional key. Across three comparative vignettes, different emotions organize distinct regimes of embodied labor. In an income-certificate dispute, "righteous" anger is performed as controlled volume, sharp timing, and upright bearing and it marks the applicant as unreasonable and defends rule-based truth as non-negotiable (Schechner: 2001; Gupta: 2012). In a second encounter, comic "evasion"—smiles, jokes, digressions, and deliberate ambiguity—functions as embodied resistance, preventing verification from “sticking” and shifting accountability away from the bureaucrat. In a third case, compassion allows the “truth” of a citizen’s bodily suffering to temporarily supersede paperwork, producing a humane state while also sorting “genuine” from “suspicious” claimants. By treating anger, humor, and compassion as embodied emotional labor, I demonstrate how the organizational legitimacy of the state and inequality are co-produced through the micro-politics of emotional performances in everyday state encounters.

Author

• Puja-Arti Patel, University of Warwick