The Paper Trail Through History

Paperwork is drawing particular attention among anthropologists, who see it as a window into the gaps between what official policy says and how it is carried out on the ground. At the American Anthropological Association?s annual meeting in November, Matthew Hull, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, ran an informal ?document clinic? to help young scholars figure out how to understand the role of official paperwork in, say, psychiatric hospitals in Kashmir, or campaigns against genetically modified crops in Latin America.