Itineraries and forms of management in the awarding of commendations by São Paulo municipal councillors: an exercise in researching with

Itinerários e manejos da produção de honrarias por vereadores em São Paulo: um exercício de pesquisar com

Abstract

This article examines the awarding of commendations in the São Paulo municipal legislature. Seen at the interface between politicians and society, the granting of commendations is a highly ritualized practice, reflecting its importance in the management of social prestige and in political disputes over official history. However, the practice is little ritualized internally to the extent that one of its key stages, the collection of signatures, is performed by bureaucrats. This practice represents an organizational enactment of the agreement, an informal set of rules of conduct and institutions that operates in the legislature, producing predictability amid the competition over resources. In this arrangement, bureaucrats play a leading role in producing the boundaries between the dimensions of cooperation and political dispute, contributing to maintenance of the agreement. Inspired by the para-site methodology of George Marcus, which aims to afford the ethnographer better access to spaces of power, the study highlights what we call a method of researching with.

Keywords
Bureaucracy; legislative; rituals; commendations; para-site ethnography

Resumo

Este artigo examina a concessão de comendas no legislativo municipal de São Paulo. Vista na interface entre políticos e sociedade, a concessão de comendas é uma prática altamente ritualizada, refletindo sua importância na gestão do prestígio social e nas disputas políticas ao longo da história oficial. No entanto, a prática é pouco ritualizada internamente, na medida em que uma de suas principais etapas, a coleta de assinaturas, é realizada por burocratas. Essa prática representa uma promulgação organizacional do acordo, um conjunto informal de regras de conduta e instituições que operam no legislativo, produzindo previsibilidade em meio à competição por recursos. Nesse arranjo, os burocratas desempenham um papel preponderante na produção dos limites entre as dimensões da cooperação e da disputa política, contribuindo para a manutenção do acordo. Inspirado na metodologia para-sítio de George Marcus, que visa proporcionar ao etnógrafo um melhor acesso aos espaços de poder, o estudo destaca o que chamamos de método de pesquisar com.

Palavras-chave
burocracia; legislativo; rituais; homenagens; etnografia para-site

In 2013, the start of the Workers’ Party (PT) government in São Paulo city, a news story caused uproar among party activists and progressive voters on social media. A proposal for commendation had been presented by the São Paulo councillor Captain Telhada in honour of the Tobias de Aguiar Ostensive Patrols (ROTA) force,¹ the São Paulo state military police shock troop. Originally created under the military dictatorship (1964-1985) to protect banks, then the targets of clandestine groups opposing the regime, the troop’s history - its missions later switched to suppressing ‘common crimes’ (Macedo, 2019) - has been marked by systematic human rights abuses. The social media uproar arose from the fact that the proposal to award the commendation had been signed by seven of the eleven councillors from PT, a centre-left party with a long history of defending human rights and condemning police brutality. Questioned by the press about their decision, the PT councillors initially claimed to have signed the document without reading it.

As they came under mounting pressure, however, especially following public criticisms made by the party’s sole female councillor, who had not signed the document, as well as clashes with the progressive media,² the lawmakers eventually asked to withdraw their support for the commendation and subsequently joined forces with the other left-wing councillors campainging for the commendation to be refused.³

Along with city halls (prefeituras), municipal councils constitute the public power at local level in the country. Uniquely worldwide, Brazil’s municipalities are considered entities of the federation, not subordinate to the federal states. This local level of government is formed through direct elections for both the mayor (prefeito) and councillors. Mayors are not subordinate to the municipal councils but depend on them for approval of ordinary legislation at municipal level, including the annual budget and the creation of posts. Meanwhile, the main activities of the municipal councils, our area of concern in this work, are the production and review of legislation and oversight of the Executive Power. Rather than exploring this set of functions, however, we shall focus on a power that frequently passes unnoticed in the public debate, namely the distribution of commendations. In the case of São Paulo municipality, the award of commendations and the realization of the subsequent official ceremonies are highly regulated procedures, governed by the Municipal Organic Law, by the Internal Regulations, by the Council Act that stipulates the physical characteristics of the commendations, and by the forms issued by the ceremonies sector when booking the auditorium and master of ceremonies.

Behind this set of procedures exists a mode through which the São Paulo Municipal Council seeks to affirm its power, exemplifying what Rivière (1989) called a political liturgy: the development of rites and ceremonies designed to promote a separation between those who can speak in the name of a collective (the councillors as its representatives) and everyone else, the public. A series of works has explored the relationship between such rituals and the efforts to constitute the State (see Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1997; Gupta, 2012; Hull, 2012; Riles, 2006)). The role of the rites lies precisely in the effect that their repeated mobilisation and formalization has on constituting a tradition able to sediment an official history as we have argued in Hoyler and Campos (2019) - or, as Pinto (2013: 20) suggests, a form of inventing history, “since they become ‘crystalized’ in official documents and may (or may not) be mobilised to tell the history of cities, the nation, a government or the legislative power.”

As the author further remarks, the importance of the rites also resides in their effects on the actors involved in their production and reproduction. Other works that examine the topic either directly (Pinto, 2013) or indirectly (Kuschnir, 2000; Hoyler, 2022) have shown that, through the distributions of tributes and commendations, councillors make evident who forms part of their political group and try to become more closely associated with those they wish to link with their image. This set of actions, therefore, is among the array of activities responsible for constituting and mobilizing networks of support for politicians and their mandates.

Although highly ritualized at the interface with society, the practice of distributing prestige through tributes and commendations is seldom a topic of controversy within the Legislature itself, where the process is marked by a ‘deritualization’ that transfers its handling to the corps of technical staff, permanently hired through public selection exams, known as personnel (funcionários), public servants or, analytically, bureaucrats.

The literature has shown that the more serious a decision is perceived to be by those controlling the rules, the more difficult it is to reach an agreement and, as a consequence, the more ritualized the process becomes (Crewe, 2021). This also means that the same process can be observed through its polar opposite. Along these lines, the case opening the text introduces a more general theme in terms of the production of what we understand as the State: the practices that routinize political decisions and their effects on the behaviour of bureaucrats. After all, how and why do councillors ‘sign without reading’ even those legislative documents produced by their political adversaries?

The first part of this topic - the routinization of political decisions - has been studied in similar form by authors who, for example, explore the effects produced by so-called political technologies (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983) and by the tools of risk analysis (Scherz, 2011): the adoption of instruments, techniques, rites and/or lineages that mask a series of political decisions under the guise of technical neutrality. Here we reach the second part of the theme, namely the way in which the tacit agreement between bureaucrats and councillors - an agreement revealed by the political salience of the example discussed here - shapes the behaviour, practices and routines assumed by the former when given the task of formalizing the documents needed to produce this political function of the Legislature: the distribution of prestige.

More broadly, observation of these relations also allows us to explore a theme central to the agenda of the anthropology of the State: the complex handling of artifacts and signs of state authority. If politics and technique are not set in binary opposition, but continually intermingled and mutually assimilated through their practices of reproduction (Hoag, 2011), what happens during this attempt to routinize political decisions? How is the political component absorbed and interpreted by the career staff of the Municipal Council? Do all its bureaucratic personnel conduct the same procedure using the same ‘technique,’ as the adjective suggests, or do they possess distinct modes of navigating space and time?

The focus on outputs like the commendations themselves, or on the institution of parliament, or simply on the individuals operating within it, as observed extensively by some lines of research on the Legislature, overlooks the processes through which relations, connections, affects and languages are produced that lead to the outcomes and artifacts that we observe crystallized in the form of public policies, laws and state documents. The act of ‘signing without reading,’ as the councillors explained their action, far from requiring merely an analysis of the supposedly ‘dysfunctional’ behaviour of parliamentarians in the Brazilian legislature, derives from a relational context that allowed the practice to happen.

To comprehend how and why this event happened, we turn to the itineraries involved in the production and management of a specific practice of material work in the legislature: the collection of signatures in support of commendations, commemorations and other tributes in the municipal council. The scale assumed by this activity, and which therefore underpins the construction of routines for it to be realized, also leads us to examine the legislature not just as an institutional power but as a bureaucracy. In this case too, the boundaries between politics and technique are always porous and continually being redefined.

In some contexts, the occurrence of political decisions is clear, namely those taken within the scope of the competent political authorities, whose decisions can only be reversed either by political decisions (such as a decree issued by the executive or a legislative decree blocking the former) or by judicial appeal. From the standpoint of public policy processes, the decisions of these actors are frequently situated in the final stages, in deliberations about content and form: the mayor signing a decree introducing a policy for sheltering the homeless; lawmakers approving a new Master Plan; members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office launching an investigation into a politician still in office. Surrounding these ‘big’ competences, however, we frequently encounter a series of ‘small’ competences, definable as such either because they require decisions of less individual impact, or because they demand such a large number of decisions that the bureaucracies organize strategies to render these decisions routine.

In the São Paulo Municipal Council, one of these small competences, so to speak, performed in large number, is the collecting of signatures of support for councillors to distribute commendations and tributes. Each councillor has the right to grant up to eight commendations during the legislature, resulting in an average of 100 commendations approved per year (according to data from SPLegis, which systematizes all the legislative output of the São Paulo Municipal Council). For these commendations to be formally accepted, they must contain, as well as the signature of the author of the request, another 36 signatures in support of the initiative. The number may not be appear high but from a material perspective of the work routines involved, this entails the need to collect at least 3,700 signatures annually. The practice of collecting these signatures requires the mobilization of specific skills and competences on the part of the bureaucrats and the sensibility to perceive the continually shifting borders of the informal rules governing the relations between bureaucrats and lawmakers.

Setting out from the limit case that opens the introduction, in this article we analyse how the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats is based on a set of practices and informal rules that sustain the production of this policy, in similar fashion to situations observed in seminal works from the sociology of organisations (Blau, 1955; Selznick, 1966), operating constitutional pacts in the form of informal institutions (in the sense of ‘informal’ formulated by Helmke and Levitsky, 2006). Studying this dimension entailed breaking through the barriers of institutional formality, which itself proves a challenge for researchers since organisations strive to create and preserve these barriers for their own continuity.

The article presents a description of the process of collecting signatures and the interactions between bureaucrats and politicians in the São Paulo Municipal Council, based on the distinct experiences of the two authors, constructed not only at different moments in time but also from different perspectives. The second author is an academic, while the first is a bureaucrat from the municipal council, a direct participant in the processes described here. This partnership was, in part, a way of overcoming barriers imposed by the institutions to keep sensitive information from public scrutiny. More than this, though, the research was developed within a collective process of seeking paths for living and studying with people, as Ingold (2019) argues. Hence, the very construction of the problem and the way we describe it here seeks to confer authority to those subjects whose quotidian activities are linked to the commonplace and mundane questions of life. This is an obviously aspirational endeavour, but even so, it points to a way forward that seeks to reflect, on a minor scale, the commitment to a dialogue between academia and bureaucracy, between researcher and bureaucrat, in the creation of para-sites, events of reflexive interaction between individuals from distinct fields. As Deeb and Marcus (2011) propose, this can help us move beyond an epistemological approach based around researcher and object.

The article is organised in three sections in addition to this introduction: the first section discusses the challenge involved in constructing the analyses, and this text in particular, which is drawn from the wealth of phenomena observed by the bureaucrats called peões (‘labourers’) by the Plenary - actors who are frequently forgotten, but who witness from close up the everyday activity of politicians - and on the encounter between the authors’ different perspectives. The second section embarks on a detailed description of the process of collecting signatures for commendations, mapping its rhythms, rites, artifacts and actors. Finally, the third section summarizes the argument and discusses a research agenda shared by authors studying entities from the justice system and other legislatures, encouraging them to think about the reproduction of institutional values and practices, as well as the role of the political sensibility of the bureaucrats in the production of the limits between the political dispute and the ‘constitutional’ consensuses involved in the State’s operation.

I - Researching with: on the construction of this ethnography

The barriers to access faced by those conducting ethnographic research on elites are relatively well-known: among them we can mention the always-full schedules, the closed doors, the questioning by security guards, the rules with whom, where and for how long one can talk, as Teixeira (2014) systematically describes. This article is the result of an exercise that sought to circumvent this barrier and simultaneously propose a form of doing research in partnership with the ‘natives.’ After all, it is no novelty to say “we are all natives” (Geertz, 1983).

One of the difficulties here is the constant sensation among researchers of always being slightly distant from where something important is happening. During her doctoral research, especially in 2018 and 2019, Telma Hoyler accompanied the everyday work of the São Paulo Municipal Council (SPMC) with the aim of understanding the institutional dynamic behind the approval of law bills. She noted that other kinds of legislative material, such as commendations and commemorations, although officially recorded as produced by lawmakers (at tribute events and in the databases of the legislature’s output), do not appear in the everyday work of the Plenary. At that time, a career bureaucrat of the SPMC, expressing dissatisfaction, said that they themselves had to collect the signatures needed to approve commendations. As the focus of the research was elsewhere at the time, the response appeared satisfactory to her. Yet there remained in the air, almost like a pulga atrás da orelha, a ‘flea behind the ear,’ a persistent itch, the sense of a dynamic existing between lawmakers and the body of bureaucrats from the Council during the sessions that was difficult for her as a researcher to access. After she had presented her research project and it had been formally ‘protocoled’ and processed, having deployed all the icons of academic prestige to obtain permission, Hoyler (2022) gained access to the galleries where the legislative aides - hired by the cabinets, not the permanent staff of the SPMC - watch the Plenary Sessions. Although this area provided an ample view of the hall, this was still not close enough. From this vantage point, an administrative and political routine could be discerned, but missing were many elements that could give meaning to the repetitions and lacunas involved in this routine. The fact that the aides sat next to her did not know or had no interest in what happened between the bureaucrats and politicians certainly said something about the institutional universe in question, albeit not enough.

The pre-existing affective relationship between the authors and the encounter of both with the literature on the instrumentation of public action (Le Galès & Lascoumes, 2005) were points of convergence that led them, setting out from different places, to develop a shared agenda concerning the problematic of the materiality of the State and, more specifically, the material practices involved in document production. While Hoyler, in her doctorate, explored the theme of legislative production from the perspective of the councillors and their aides, Pedro Campos has long-term experience of legislative production from the viewpoint of the bureaucracy, starting from the period immediately following what was observed by Hoyler. Ten years prior to the publication of this article, he himself had been one of the Plenary’s peões or ‘labourers’ as they were called by a colleague from the sector (herself a peoa). From this vantage point, he witnessed the daily work of those responsible for the activity and shared their apprehensions, tensions and impressions about living on a quotidian basis so close to those in power, hearing their stories, causes and daily reports, overhearing the intrigues, disputes and open complaints among them - line managers, senior managers and councillors, considered the ’55 different bosses’ for whom they work - as well as the solutions and the heuristic and handy little rules that they adopted to solve problems, perform their work and determine when a job was well done. Campos was both puzzled and astounded by the way in which his colleagues individually identified the dozens of signatures found on the commendation documents, visually striking artifacts, as can be observed in Image 1. The names below the signatures were added by his colleagues.

Image 1
Sheet of signatures of support for commendations - format 1

The routinization of political decisions allows us to examine the relationship between the permanent staff and politicians, less studied than the relationship between politicians and the group of aides with commissioned posts or the permanent staff occupying management posts. These are possibly less studied because they are less frequent, given that usually this encounter is mediated by intermediary posts known as medium-level bureaucracy (Cavalcante & Lotta, 2015). Setting out from debates rooted in theory, Hoyler was initially unsure of the relevance of the theme explored in this article: after all, legislatures have a small bureaucracy, meaning they are not the best institutional space to analyse the topic. But when this interaction between technicians and politicians unfolds in the SPMC, what does it tell us about the encounter between the rigidity of the machine and the reality of politics? The stability of the ‘machine,’ as the State is frequently called by the bureaucrats themselves, requires them to possess the capacity to resist the impacts and potential arbitrariness of these interactions. This resistance appears to us like the visible face of the fixity projected by the state bodies. How is this appearance of fixity produced? What are the effects on this stability of the encounters and negotiations between politicians and bureaucrats? The authors arrived at these questions through a dialogical process that brought the professions of ethnographer and bureaucrat into closer proximity.

For Hoyler, as a bureaucrat-researcher, reflecting on these questions gives form to the ontological unease of those working behind the scenes of power, which involves thinking about how the interlocution with political authorities takes place. As a researcher-bureaucrat, there is an obvious concern with the accuracy of information, which provide the motive for a series of conversations held in 2022 with bureaucrats responsible for the process of collecting signatures, most of them colleagues of Campos with whom interpretations and preoccupations were shared, elaborated and re-elaborated. This material was combined with impressions and details taken from the recollections of [first author] and his autobiographical account, which placed lived experience itself under the microscope.

Although the dilemmas faced were not exactly the same as those discussed by authors like Silva (2014) in terms of simultaneously combining ethnographic research and bureaucratic work, doing ethnography in this kind of configuration raises diverse ethical-methodological and even epistemological questions: Can bureaucrats speak for themselves? How does the activity of reflection, more systematic listening and writing participate in the construction of a public identity different to how this professional class is generally perceived? How did Campos come to be perceived in his everyday work and how did this affect the conditions under which the text was produced? How did the prior proximity with Campos affect the perception that Hoyler had of bureaucrats and politicians and how did this affect the research and the disposition to produce it? What and who does this text serve? To what extent can ethnography be a space for bureaucrats (and other classes of professionals) to elaborate their lived experiences?

Thinking about these questions, though still uncertain about our responses, we decided to push on with our efforts, since the text and the exercise involved in its construction pointed toward a form of undertaking research on a mutual basis. This approach devolves authority to the people with whom ethnographers do research and enables analytic and theoretical questions to be formulated on the basis of questions of everyday life, as Ingold (2019) proposes. Taking the author’s lead, ethnography in this case would not serve to explain bureaucratic behaviour but to learn from the life experiences of people situated in different places of the social fabric that interconnects us.

In seeking to deepen our attempts to denormalize the gaze, the para-site method (Marcus, 2000; Maurer, 2005; Deeb & Marcus, 2011) offers a way forward. The term ‘para-site’ is used to describe experiments with spaces orchestrated to promote interaction between the subjects involved in a particular field, looking to develop mutual collaborations between researchers and research subjects who, in the context of their everyday practices, demonstrate an analytic interest and conceptual curiosity evocative of the ethnographer’s mode of thinking. In Hoag’s terms (2011), there exists between the two a complicity with their institutions of power of origin. Sometimes, though, they are antagonistic towards these institutions or simply sympathetic to those with whom they interact in the workplace who, in the case of street-level bureaucrats, they should control. This collaborative experimentation and reflection with research subjects can help shift the bias of the norms and functions of bureaucratic organisations towards lived experience. The exercises described by Deeb and Marcus (2011) suggest the need for an institutional organisation to this end, albeit one difficult to construct. This text is a venture in this direction and, although lacking more comprehensive institutional backing, points to a form of constructing knowledge through mutual cooperation.

II - The process of collecting signatures in support of commendations: some bureaucrats, 55 bosses and an agreement

We set out from a combined analysis of two perspectives seldom encountered in the study of legislative institutions: the Legislature as a bureaucratic organisation and as an institution that bestows prestige.

From the viewpoint of the distribution of responsibilities and bureaucratic organisation, the Legislature - in any Brazilian town or city - is eclipsed by its local Executive counterpart, the city hall, in terms of size, budget and, consequently, the complexity of their administrations. This applies even to São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city, which has the maximum number of councillors permissible under the Federal Constitution.⁴ Even so, a legislature of this size is reflected in the volume of activities performed and documents elaborated and processed annually. Based on the activity reports produced monthly by the Municipal Council, we can note the annual occurrence of hundreds of sessions, including the ordinary and extraordinary committee meetings and those of the Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry (Comissões Parlamentares de Inquérito: CPIs). Turning to the data from the legislative process control system (SPLegis), we can observe that thousands of documents introduced by lawmakers, including law bills, legislative decrees and diverse kinds of petitions, are elaborated, protocoled, catalogued, analysed and archived over the same period. To perform this work, the SPMC possesses a cadre of around two thousand public servants, half of these working for the cabinets and another half distributed among the administrative, parliamentary and communication sectors.

Within this contingent of resources, the focus of our work led us to concentrate on two sectors of the Municipal Council that find themselves on the frontline of legislative processes: the Plenary Support Teams (SGP.21) and the Legislative Process Control (SGP.22). These teams are jointly responsible for receiving and managing documents sent to the Plenary, the highest decision-making body of the Legislature, composed of all the councillors and the venue where the most important deliberations of the legislative proceedings occur - notably, the consideration of legislative proposals and vetoes submitted by the Executive.

Beginning the description of the sectors through their participation in the legislative process, we start with SGP.22, the sector responsible for protocoling legislative proposals - that is, the material councillors present to the Plenary with the purpose of changing and creating rules, such as law bills (projetos de lei: PL), draft legislative decrees (projetos de decreto legislativo: PDL), draft resolutions (projetos de resolução: PR) and draft amendments to organic law (projetos de emenda à lei orgânica: PLO), as well as petitions for the Council to pronounce on some event or matter, such as motions, commemorations or condolences, or authorizing the realization of official ceremonies. The protocol is a set of activities that involves receiving a document, conducting a pre-analysis of compliance with a strictly formal set of requirements (hence without judging its merits) in order for them to be received and, if compliant, the recording of the date and time of their entry, their numbering in accordance with the sequence of documents of the same type, and the registering of this document in the information and process management systems. This is the first stage in the formalization of a proposal. A document cannot be wiped from the records, for example, once it has been registered (protocolado).

The activity of protocoling is simple to execute: it requires no specific technical training and can be undertaken by public workers approved in selection exams meeting the minimum requirement of a general high school education. Frequently the work is performed by interns under the supervision of permanent staff. Despite being an activity with a stage (document verification) that demands careful attention to the prerequisites, the combination of strategies involving the specialization of tasks and the distribution of guides with rules (compiled from articles taken from the internal regulations and municipal laws) enables with the routine execution of activities. In this sector, the pace is calm and even tedious. The bureaucrats arrive, sit at their desks, switch on their computers and wait. Work rhythms are defined by the timetable of the Plenary sessions - Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons are the busiest. In the morning and late afternoon and on Mondays and Fridays the work volume is much lower. The main interlocutors with this sector are the councillors’ aides, generally responsible for the initial submission of legislative documents, and members of the other sector to be described here, who work directly in the Plenary.

The infrequent occasions when the sector has to work urgently are moments when clashes in municipal politics lead to pressure for prioritization of a protocol, a situation that can be observed, for example, in the dispute between government and opposition over the creation of Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry (CPIs). Other moments are casuistic, such as the interest of an aide or councillor in presenting a document and being able to receive an attractive round number (‘PL 100,’ for example) or the like to help promote an initiative. At these moments, the order in which the initiatives are protocoled matters greatly and the ‘protocol clock,’ an instrument used to stamp and officially record the order of entry of documents, reigns as the absolute arbiter of the order of entry of the initiatives - or at least the bureaucrats rely on this fact to avoid themselves becoming the arbiters.

SGP.21, for its part, is the sector responsible for directly accompanying the activities in the Plenary: its staff organise the agendas of the ordinary and extraordinary sessions (the types of meetings most commonly held), control the list of speakers during the different phases of the sessions, receive motions directly presented in the Plenary by councillors and aides, safeguard the bills that are ready to be voted on or are awaiting a decision from the Plenary on their fate, and perform the activity explored in this article: the collection of signatures from councillors in the Plenary for documents that involve commendations or the realization of ceremonial sessions. The bureaucrats from this sector are among the few permitted to circulate in the Plenary during the sessions and approach the councillors for them to sign the initiatives of their esteemed colleagues.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, which drove the migration of diverse procedures to digital format, including the presentation of initiatives to be protocoled, such documents were processed entirely on paper. This meant, for example, that the cabinets, when filing a draft piece of legislation (a law, a legislative decree or an amendment to organic law) or a motion, had to take the document signed by the councillor, as well as copies of this document to the protocol office (sala do protocolo), to await pre-evaluation of a bureaucrat from SGP.22. The original document was protocoled - a term used to refer to the gesture of applying the digital clock stamp, marking the exact time of the action - and then labelled and registered in the system. The original would proceed normally through the council while the cabinet copy returned to the cabinet, stamped and labelled.

This process occurred with all the initiatives, except for a significant portion of those concerned with the awarding of tributes: the granting of commendations, requests for ceremonial sessions to be held, commemorations and recognitions. This does not include tributes that involve the establishment of commemorative dates or the naming of public roads or facilities, as Pinto (2013) also emphasizes, owing to the simple fact that these cases do not require signatures of ‘support.’

Although the Municipal Councils and representative bodies in general are frequently discredited and delegitimized in public discourse,⁵ the frequency with which tributes are awarded and celebratory activities held, across the entire political spectrum, indicates that the institution enjoys prestige among diverse social groups and possesses some degree of importance in the symbolic and practical dimensions of everyday life. Even though they may disagree with the actions of councillors or even with the decisions made by its Steering Committee, political groups close to or constituting mandates also reinforce the legitimacy of the São Paulo Municipal Council as a space of political articulation and substantive discussions through the way in which they engage with the tributes, anniversaries and celebrations organized by the council. This process foregrounds the dispute over the meanings of the rites, symbols and distribution of prestige for the construction of the histories of the city, the state and the country, as Pinto (2013) argued in studying the ritualization of the process of distributing tributes and commendations in São Paulo municipality.

Since 2011, when data began to be made openly available for consultation, the SPMC has achieved an average of 156 ceremonial sessions per year, occurring more often than the ordinary sessions - those in which law bills are voted on, as established by the internal regulations. These ceremonial sessions are held for diverse motives: the celebration of commemorative dates on the municipal calendar, the anniversaries of munciipal districts, public and private entities, organisations and events, as well as tributes to celebrated figures, leaders and artistic and cultural initiatives, and ceremonies for bestowing honorary titles and institutional awards. In the latter two cases, in just the last ten years, 14 new institutional awards were created and almost 900 commendations were granted to individuals and organisations. The presentation of requests to register commemorations, congratulations, condolences and recognitions are also frequent and attain an average yearly volume of 900, 100 and 25, respectively.

As we mentioned earlier, the types of proposals highlighted here possess a peculiarity: in order for them to be evaluated, they must be presented with a minimum number of so-called signatures of support.⁶ More significant than this peculiarity is the way in which the council resolved this apparently organisational problem: who collects the signatures of support for these initiatives are the bureaucrats from SGP.21 rather than the political aides. The bureaucrats would expect the exact opposite to occur considering that these activities are an expression of the political relations that the councillors establish with their own groups and communities of supporters, as well as the fact that a signature of support would signify, in principle, an acquiescence, an agreement, concerning the merit of commemorating an individual or entity. As one of the interviewed bureaucrats responsible for the collection of signatures pointed out: “We always found it strange that this kind of responsibility would fall to the technical sector.”

This initially led us to seek to understand the material aspects of the realization of this activity. Hence we began with the figures: setting out from the annual averages of 900 requests for commemorations, 156 requests for ceremonial sessions, 90 titles of commendation, we arrived at a total of 31,494 signatures⁷ to be collected yearly to enable these initiatives, or an average of 572 signatures per councillor.

If the signatures of support were collected by the parliamentary cabinets themselves, the aides or lawmakers would have to approach the other lawmakers one by one in their cabinets or during other activities - ideally in the Municipal Council itself - to persuade them to back the initiative. Certainly it would be impossible for the councillors themselves, with so many activities to perform, to collect such a large volume of signatures. Their aides, therefore, would have to collect the signatures either by visiting the cabinets separately or by asking the lawmakers to sign the papers whenever they crossed paths in the corridors, in the Plenary or in meetings of the Committees. Since the Plenary, during the ordinary and extraordinary sessions, is the place where the councillors are most frequently found gathered together, we would witness a tumultuous scene with dozens of aides circulating through the space, approaching lawmakers and collecting the large numbers of signatures needed to submit the requests. The norms of the SPMC thus establish that only a fairly limited number of aides can circulate in the Plenary. The staff from SGP.21 must collect the signatures for these documents.

We could continue the discussion (and initially we did) by attempting to find an organizational explication for this solution.⁸ However, the explanation seems to reside elsewhere: responsibility was transferred to bureaucrats, since the type of activity concerned is defined as ‘uncontroversial’ among the list of those legislative activities covered by what we can simply call, borrowing a term from Pinto (2013), an agreement between the councillors. This ‘agreement’ involves a pact on a set of informal rules and norms of conduct that guide and sanction the behaviour of councillors and their relations to the formal rules of the legislative process. In this pact, the commendations are a right of every councillor. In principle, this means that all councillors, in general, and irrespective of their political affiliations, treat the award of commendations as a right of their peers too. On signing the document, therefore, contrary to the generic idea of providing a ‘signature of support’ and thus endorsing the honoured person, there is an acknowledgment of the right of another councillor to present his or her own tributes.

Furthermore, as Kuschnir (2000) argues, here too we can observe an important dimension of reciprocity between councillors: they sign in support of other proposals for tributes and commendations in the anticipation of receiving signatures for their own proposals in return. The topic can also be analysed from the viewpoint of collective action. Best and Vogel (2012) explore the question through the concept of antagonistic cooperation, a situation of collective action in which legislators, although competing among themselves to an extent, seek a balance between cooperation and competition by agreeing on the rules and the ways of applying them, and by cooperating with decision-making.

It is interesting to note that the simple existence of a formal rule does not automatically include it within this agreement. One time, during the period when Hoyler was conducting ethnographic research on the Plenary sessions, a councilman who had recently entered the SPMC successfully included a law bill authored by his political rival on the voting agenda. Then, exploiting a moment of inattentiveness from the councilwoman proposing the bill and other colleagues in the Plenary, he asked the Steering Committee for voting on the legislation to be reversed. In other words, rather than asking for those favourable to remain seated where they were, the custom in symbolic votes, the President of the Committee, granting the request, asked for those opposed to stay put. This led to the rejection of the bill by an overwhelming majority. The case provoked outrage among the councillors, even those considered political adversaries of the councilwoman whose bill had been rejected: although not breaking any formal rule, the ruse had broken the pact considered part of the game, creating an environment unfavourable to the decision-making process itself.

Finally, the fact that the signatures of support for this specific type of proposal are collected by bureaucrats, while collecting signatures of support for a request to open a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry bypasses the bureaucrats entirely, reinforces the idea that the former are not generally a motive for controversy. However, the fact that the tributes are not a controversial question among the councillors does not make the practice of collecting signatures by the SPMC’s bureaucratic staff a neutral activity. It is merely a transfer of a political responsibility to a permanent cadre of public servants. This differs from cases like the one related by Scherz (2011), where we see the deployment of technical solutions that employ a scientific language as tools to mask the maintenance of decisions difficult for street-level bureaucrats, given that there is no neutral technical argument to justify the transference of the decision to sign a document or not. Hence, the episode recounted in the introduction shows, for example, the risk of signing a document without reading it, relying solely on the ‘technical guidance’ of the bureaucrats.

Here we can return to SGP.22 to understand how the proposals dependent on signatures of support are received. Rather than protocoling the documents with the use of the digital clock, the sector simply marks the document with a stamp of receipt without recording the exact time it was submitted. As far as the sector staff understand, echoed too in the way that the cabinets present the matter, it is as though the document had not yet been formally received. The stamped copy is no longer proof that the document was processed by the sector and no deadline is set for it to be effectively protocoled. In this state of limbo, in which the documents are no longer in the phase of being drafted by the cabinets but have not yet been ‘protocoled’ either, the documents are forwarded by SGP.22 to the SGP.21 team, responsible for collecting the signatures. Thereafter, the documents are divided up between the team members for them to circulate through the Plenary during its sessions, approaching the councillors to sign the huge piles of documents. Only after collecting the minimum number of signatures, which varies according to the type of document involved, and after being checked by the person responsible for the collection, are the documents returned to SPG.22, where they are stamped with the protocol clock and assigned a number.

During the Plenary activities, in the ordinary and extraordinary sessions, it is possible to note men in suits (the collection team today is 100% male and mostly young, while the dress code in the council, though much criticized by councilwomen for, among other reasons, failing to even consider the terminology of female formal dress by continuing to demand use of a suit and tie) circulating seriously and sometimes discretely among the councillors, waiting for opportune moments to interrupt an activity, offer a pen, present a pile of papers that they carry in tow and stand ready to remove each sheet of paper from the path of the pen with each signature, allowing this dull work of the councillors to be completed as quickly and smoothly as possible.

For various reasons, this is complicated work that demands attention, discretion and a degree of self-control. The bureaucrats feel under pressure for the process of collecting signatures to not take too long - not only do the cabinets call them to check progress, the councillors in the Plenary may query delays in the process. The councillors - and there are a lot of them - are authority figures who are not always open, affable or even interested in cooperating with an activity. Some do not accept any mistakes being made - such as, for instance, collecting repeated signatures in the same set of documents. The sheets with signatures are visually striking documents that used to evoke something bordering on chaos, looking like a sprawling mass of graffiti tags and slogans (pixos)⁹ from the urban landscape reproduced on paper, the signatures covering the blank spaces of the sheets in random and improvised manner. This changed about ten years ago when SGP.21 started to produce sheets with reverse sides containing spaces allocated for each councillor’s signature. Image 1 depicts this visual chaos while Images 2 and 3 allow us to observe the changes, made at the initiative of the younger members of the sector’s bureaucratic staff, which we shall discuss later.

The transformation of the document layouts from Image 2 to Image 3 also reveals the tension present in the relations between bureaucrats and councillors. Image 2 was a proposal that came from the bureaucracy to enhance the legibility of the document and facilitate verification of the signatures. The solution was a grid on the back of the original sheet of the proposal that provided equal space for each councillor’s name for them to sign. But this measure failed to impress the politicians: some remarked that it looked like a bingo card, some simply ignored the spaces provided and signed the front of the document, refusing to sign on the back (as can be seen in Image 2 with a signature to the left of the author’s signature on the document’s obverse side), while there were even those who complained directly to the Presidency about the new procedure. The team’s solution was to transform the reverse side of signatures into the format seen in Image 3, which distributes the spaces for the signatures in two columns. This layout of the signatures reduced their legibility (we can note that the signatures of the councillors tend to be large, occupying more space on the document than the area provided). This, in turn, increased the attention needed from the councillors to avoid signing in the wrong field and from the bureaucrats to identify who had signed.

In the latter case, in fact, the introduction of the new models resulted in the need to print a grid for the signatures on the reverse of each proposal - on the original signed copy. If a mistake was made or there was some problem with the printing, they would have to solicit a new signed copy from the cabinet of the author of the proposal.

Image 2
Sheet of signatures of support for commendations - format 2

Image 3
Sheet of signatures of support for commendations - format 3

This sector only recently began to be composed mostly of bureaucrats called estatutários, hired through public selection exams. Before then, although the administrative regulations stipulated that the senior management always had to be statutory workers, the team was divided between comissionados (commissioned staff)¹⁰ and celetistas (‘CLT-hired’ staff).¹¹ While statutory workers entered the council via approval in public exams, the presence of the celetistas and comissionados in the sector is linked to their capacity for political articulation - that is, through the relationship with someone close to a councillor, since they depend on the latter for their requests for commissions to be made. In their daily activities, the bureaucrats talk about the internal divisions that ended up separating them into groups according to the modality under which they were hired - the newer and older members of the sector, the more timid and the more extrovert. In a way, this origin also appeared reflected in the comfort or discomfort with which some team members went about the activity of collecting signatures. In the words of one of the interviewees, “most of the time, it was the older staff who collected [the signatures] because they have an almost personal connection to the councillors due to the time spent working at the SPMC.” The older staff not only demonstrate confidence in going about their work, they also show a degree of intimacy with the lawmakers, a different way of behaving when circulating among authorities, exchanging greetings, comments and jokes, something that simply did not occur with the statutory bureaucrats, young men in their early thirties, who exchanged as few words as possible with the lawmakers and gesticulated discretely, avoiding as much as possible interrupting conversations and become involved in the hubbub.

This difference in the individual profiles influenced the rhythm of the work. The draft legislative decrees - the documents considered the most ‘noble’ by the councillors and bureaucrats alike - were mostly handled by the older bureaucrats. The reason alleged for this fact was the expertise needed and, to some extent, the prestige of being the person responsible for the document. These documents require as many as double the number of signatures of the other kinds in order for them to start to be considered. Hence, if the person responsible for the task experiences some difficulty in approaching the lawmakers, the activity can take a long time. Furthermore, each councillor assumes a distinct stance not only in relation to the person collecting the signatures but also in relation to the activity of collecting them. The activity was, however, one of the few of its kind distributed to younger staff when the SPMC’s composition was altered following elections. In the words of one of the interviewed bureaucrats: “At the start of each legislature, we would present ourselves, a certain degree of friendship would be created with the councillors, which meant we already knew who to ask for signatures.”

Most of the time the councillors take the pen offered by the bureaucrat and sign the pile of documents almost automatically, very often while continuing their conversations with aides or other councillors or even while talking on the phone. In other words, they frequently ‘sign without reading.’ There are also those who prefer to examine what they are signing more carefully to decide whether they wish to sign. By taking their time with the documents, however, these politicians are seen by the bureaucrats as too time-consuming to approach - they spend longer analysing each document abstract, selecting those they want to sign, while passing remarks on the others. Over time, the bureaucrats develop a particular intiution concerning those from whom signatures can be obtained more quickly, allowing them to gather the minimum number required for the documents to be protocoled. After all, a councillor who prefers to read the papers carefully may take three, four or even five times longer than someone who simply grabs the pen and signs in the same spot repeatedly until completed. As it is unnecessary for everyone to sign, those who ‘read’ can be avoided.

The knowledge of the bureaucrats, as well as filtering those who sign more quickly, involves recognising the signatures already collected, as we noted earlier. At the end of the workday, if the bureaucrat has been unable to expedite all the documents requiring signatures, he checks the signatures collected to avoid asking a councillor to sign the same set of documents again. This task requires the bureaucrats to know how to identify - on documents similar to those shown in Images 1 to 3 (either with spaces for the signatures already designated, in the case of individual or collective authorship, or without any predefined space for signing) - each of the signatures of the 55 councillors and occasionally their substitutes. This includes remembering that if a substitute signed a set of documents, the office holder cannot sign the document in question should he or she return in the middle of the process.

All these precautions and skills developed by the bureaucrats aim to minimize the risk of frictions with the councillors, not only to avoid hampering the work of the latter, but also to avoid the risk of complaints arising about their own work. Such complaints could ultimately see them transferred to another department. In this eventuality, they could lose the bonus received for supporting the activities of the Plenary, a portion of their monthly pay earned simply for working in the sector. In this situation, we can observe how technical and political risks intersect. The everyday work of the bureaucrats becomes even more difficult considering that the councillors have distinct profiles and the autonomy to press for the transfer of bureaucrats. [First author], who collected signatures in the Plenary just a few times, but has been involved in other sorts of activities there for almost three years, shared his colleagues’ feeling of having 55 bosses in addition to his immediate boss, each with his or her own particularities and, sometimes, conflicting interests, making it difficult to remember their individual preferences.

Each of these pragmatic considerations is incorporated into the form taken by the team’s work in a distinct way. This difference also affected the paces and performance of each bureaucrat when collecting signatures, which frequently generated situations in which documents took much longer to be ‘protocoled’ simply because of the person who had been made responsible for collecting them.

Moreover, beyond the pragmatic considerations, in order to maintain an adequate pace of work, political or strategic considerations also form part of the everyday work of the bureaucrats. There were cases in which a public worker knew from prior experience that a particular councillor would not sign documents introduced by another, or that he or she disliked an issue, entity or association mentioned in the document, and, for this reason, avoided presenting it to the councillor. In other cases, due to some urgent situation, pressure from management or from the presidency of the SPMC itself, the documents were distributed to some of the bureaucrats whose resourcefulness provided them with the ‘courage’ to visit the cabinet of an unfriendly councillor to ask for a missing signature needed during an emergency.

In the dialogues between colleagues, accounts and mutual apprenticeships concerning the tortuous paths of work and even in more heated discussions, the situations were framed as a way of asserting oneself professionally vis-á-vis others. Quickly resolving urgent demands to collect signatures and discerning who may present problems concerning a particular document were ways of showing adroitness and attitude in relation to the councillors. These skills, in turn, allowed some bureaucrats to occupy a prominent place in the hierarchical structure, constructing a particular vision of what it means to perform this work adequately and, therefore, what the functions of a public worker from the sector should be.

From this position of competence, the more experienced staff members, who were not among those with the most stable jobs (comissionados and celetistas), reaffirmed their permanent position in contrast to the temporary status of the lawmakers. There was an established view, therefore, that bureaucrats - whose job position is stable, meaning that they remain during the changes between each legislature - should also develop a political sensibility, a capacity to discern the political contexts and splits present in the SPMC.

This reality, experienced intensely by [first author] during the period when he worked accompanying the activities of the Plenary, transformed significantly following the implantation of systems for the digital management of documents, called ‘electronic processing.’ According to the interviews, SGP.21’s responsibility for obtaining signatures of support fell. However, this did not mean a solution to the problems potentially arising from the routinization of this activity. As one of the interviewees recounted, in 2020, Councillor Rinaldi Digilio presented a proposal to award a commendation to Michele Bolsonaro, the first lady of the former President Jair Bolsonaro. Once again, the document contained signatures from PT councillors. Unlike the case presented in the introduction, though, this time the rules designed for the electronic processing system had simply omitted the possibility of removing signatures. This meant that the PT councillors remained in the uncomfortable situation of appearing to be guarantors of the qualities of the person being honoured.

According to the interviewee, a formal adoption of this now tacit rule could transform the logic of the commendations, ensuring the right of everyone to present commendations and forcing the Plenary to engage in a public discussion of the merit of those honoured. In his view:

Councillors sign without reading, imagining there won’t be any really polemical cases. Approving a commendation in the Plenary is another matter entirely, not everyone succeeds. But once the request is protocoled, the opportunity is created to speak publicly in favour or against.

However, the public discomfort of lending support remains. Or as the interviewee put it: “[…] in highly polemical cases, such as that of Michelle Bolsonaro, it’s not worth the risk.”

III. Final remarks

When the Municipal Council issues an anniversary tribute or celebration - with the different degrees of political importance of the honoured person - the impression conveyed to society is that the history of the city and the country are a constant matter of dispute. Through tributes, people whose acts were previously seen as undesirable or simply ignored as central elements in the country’s formation become recognised - or the opposite, names that were once valorised come to lose credibility. In this sense, tributes constitute important tools for the constructing of history and counter-history.

We have seen that what appears from the viewpoint of public opinion as a dispute over history, determined by the different ideological orientations behind the tributes and the political affiliation of their proponents, actually involves a much more consensual dynamic when seen from the viewpoint of processes within the legislature. Councillors understand that their colleagues have the right to distribute these forms of prestige, in equal numbers, based on what Pinto (2013) calls an agreement, which is fulfilled, save in cases of major political salience, as we saw in the case recounted in the introduction.

From diverse angles of analysis, this pact dialogues with the idea of reciprocity present in Kuschnir (2000) through which councillors expect to receive back the same as they concede, or the idea of antagonistic cooperation (Best & Vogel, 2012), a situation of collective action in which legislators, although competing with each other, establish a balance between cooperation and competition by agreeing to the rules and how to use them, and cooperating over the decision-making processes. This creates an environment favourable to the work dynamic, processes and flows in which politicians need to engage for their own legislation to be able to progress.

The opposite of this scenario, which occurs precisely during periods of heightened political tension and polarization between government and opposition, is the paralysis of the legislative process. This practice, in turn, entails the transfer of responsibility for the collection of signatures to bureaucrats, who effectively turn political decisions into routines: who is likely to support a particular tribute, and who will be left out? Or who will assume the risk of guaranteeing the reputation of a particular figure or institution?

The bureaucrats, for their part, acquire knowledge about how to proceed with the collection of signatures through lived experience with politicians and their colleagues. As Hoag (2011) points out, studies of bureaucracies are so dominated by a normative understanding of what bureaucracies must be - from which we can infer the ubiquity of the Weberian perspective of bureaucracies and the near omnipotence of the discourses of bureaucracies about themselves - that it is a challenge even for anthropology to engender a shift in perspective and eschew the question ‘does this bureaucracy function?’ However, these kinds of shifts, as Hoag also emphasizes, offer us other analytic frameworks with which to comprehend the logic of bureaucracies not only as organisations with specific purposes, but also as “life-world[s] populated by actual buildings, specific objects and people with anxieties and dreams” (Hoag & Hull, 2017).

We have sought to comprehend the experiences lived by individuals who circulate within and construct these spaces, affecting and being affected by these organisations over time. This required becoming immersed in the work routines and daily life, in the interactions between individuals and objects, and in the mediation between individuals through objects. In the practice of collecting signatures, the knowledge, skills and sensibilities that the bureaucrats develop - behaviours such as avoiding asking for the signature of a councillor who reads the papers attentively and slowly, so as to optimize their time collecting signatures - indicate the attempt to minimize the risk of frictions with the councillors. In so doing, they reinforce the tacit agreement existing between councillors, thereby revealing their vital role in the production and stretching of the limits between ‘constitutional’ consensuses in the functioning of the State and the agreed dimension of political dispute between the councillors.

Seeking to feed from and dialogue with other research agendas that have helped this discussion mature, we encountered in analyses of the judiciary a consolidated research agenda concerning the effects of the rites, discourses and practices of this power on those under jurisdiction. The creation and mobilization of social categories like ‘minority’ (Vianna, 2014 or ‘disappeared’ (Ferreira, 2011) by jurisdictional practices are examples of how small ‘technical’ competences, which convert the dramas of individuals into case records, affect the life of people in an absolutely political form. Beyond the relation between bureaucrats and individuals outside the State, the observation of the interactions within the state apparatus, that is, the relation between analysts and technicians on one hand and authorities - judges and members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office - on the other can offer new insights and interesting perspectives for our understanding of the effects of the material practices involved in the maintenance or subversion of the forms of producing the justice system.

Finally, we invite readers of this work, researchers interested in the production of more inclusive and non-normative gazes and perspectives concerning the State and its bureaucracies, to assume the establishment of ‘contact zones’ (Deeb & Marcus, 2011) with bureaucrats as a research practice, stimulating a curiosity in the latter about the production of interpretations and analyses based on their own lived experiences, proposing a shift away from the position of a mere informant.

Acknowledgments

Telma Hoyler thanks the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CEM) and FAPESP for financing part of her research at the CEM through the CEPID Program (2013/07616-7). This article is also part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 834986).

References

• BEST, H.; VOGEL, L., 2012. “The Emergence and Transformation of Representative Roles.” In: O. Rozenberg; M. Blomgren (eds.), Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures London: Routledge. pp. 1-21
• Blau, P. M. (1955). The Dynamics of Bureaucracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• CREWE, Emma 2021. The Anthropology of Parliaments. Entanglements in Democratic Politics London: Routledge .
• CAVALCANTE, P.; LOTTA, G. (eds.) 2015. Burocracia de Médio Escalão: perfil, trajetória e atuação Brasília: ENAP.
• DEEB, H.; MARCUS, George. 2011. “In the green room: an experiment in ethnographic method at the WTO”. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34(1): 51-76.
• DREYFUS, H.; RABINOW, Paul. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• FERREIRA, L. 2011. O etnógrafo, o burocrata e o desaparecimento de pessoas no Brasil: notas sobre pesquisar e participar da formulação de uma causa. In: Castilho, S., Lima, A. & Teixeira, C.(org.). Antropologia das práticas de poder Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa.
• GEERTZ, Clifford. From The Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding (1983). Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Oct., 1974), pp. 26-45 (20 pages)
• GUPTA, A., 2012. Red Tape London: Duke University.
• HELMKE, Gretchen; Levitsky, Steven. 2006. Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda. Perspectives on Politics. December 2004 | Vol. 2/No. 4, pp. 725-740
• HOAG, C. 2011. “Assembling Partial Perspectives: Thoughts on the Anthropology of Bureaucracy”. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34(1): 81-94.
• HOAG, Colin; HULL, Matthew S. 2017. “A Review of the Anthropological Literature on the Civil Service.” World Bank Policy Research Working, Paper No. 8081, Available at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2985506
  » https://ssrn.com/abstract=2985506
• HOYLER, T. 2022. Representação política e conexão territorial: uma etnografia de vereadores e brokers em São Paulo Tese de doutorado, Departamento de Ciência Política, São Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo.
• HOYLER, T.; CAMPOS, P. 2019. “A vida política dos documentos: notas sobre burocratas, políticas e papéis”. Revista de Sociologia e Política., v. 27, n. 69: https://www.scielo.br/j/rsocp/a/YtWnq4xQjqykCmvXXjHcPZy/?lang=pt
  » https://www.scielo.br/j/rsocp/a/YtWnq4xQjqykCmvXXjHcPZy/?lang=pt
• HULL, M., 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan Berkeley: University of California.
• INGOLD, Tom. 2019. Antropologia: para que serve? Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.
• KUSCHNIR, Karina. 2000. O cotidiano da política. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
• LE GALES, Patrick; Lascoumes, Pierre. (eds.) 2005. Gouverner par les instruments. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po
• MACEDO, H. L. S. 2019. “A doutrina da ROTA: o ethos do ‘Policial de ROTA’”. Áskesis, 8(1): 31-144.
• MARCUS, George. 2000. “Introduction”. In: G. Marcus.; E. George (eds.), Para-Sites: A Casebook Against Cynical Reason Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 1-15.
• MAURER, Bill. 2005 Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• PINTO, D. 2013. Homenagens do legislativo: uma etnografia dos processos simbólicos do estado Tese de doutorado, São Carlos, UFSCAR.
• RILES, A. (org.), 2006. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
• RIVIÈRE, C. 1989. As liturgias da política Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora.
• SCHERZ, C. 2011. “Protecting Children, Preserving Families: Moral Conflict and Actuarial Science in a Problem of Contemporary Governance”. Polar, 44(1): pp. 33-50
• SELZNICK, Phillip. 1966. A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization New York: University of California Press
• SILVA, Margarida. 2014.“Trabalhar e investigar enquanto antropóloga na administração pública: breves considerações ético-metodológicas”. In: S. Castilho; A. Lima; C. Teixeira (eds.). Antropologia das práticas de poder Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa . Pp. 243-252
• TEIXEIRA, C. D 2014.“Pesquisando instâncias estatais: reflexões sobre o segredo e a mentira”. In: S. Castilho; A. Lima; C. Teixeira (eds.), Antropologia das práticas de poder Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa . pp. 33-42
• VIANNA, A., 2014. “Etnografando documentos: uma antropóloga em meio a processos judiciais”. In: S. Castilho; A. Lima; C. Teixeira (eds.), Antropologia das práticas de poder Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa . pp. 43-70

• 1
  In Portuguese: Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar.
• 2
  For examples of how the topic was covered by the media, see: http://spressosp.com.br/2013/04/11/vereadores-do-pt-assinaram-projeto-de-telhada-de-homenagem-a-rota-a-troco-do-que/; https://www.viomundo.com.br/politica/vereadores.html;https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/politica/2013/03/bancada-do-pt-na-camara-de-sao-paulo-retira-apoio-para-projeto-que-homenageia-a-rota/; https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2013/09/03/em-sessao-tumultuada-camara-de-vereadores-de-sp-aprova-homenagem-a-rota.htm. Consulted 28 June 2022.
• 3
  This opposition proved unsuccessful, however. ROTA was duly honoured in October 2013 with a Silver Salver, a kind of commendation granted by the São Paulo Municipal Council to institutions.
• 4
  Each municipality has a maximum number of councillors established by the 1988 Constitution and Constitutional Amendment 58 of 2009, varying from 9 councillors in the case of smaller municipalities of up to 15,000 inhabitants to 55 in the case of municipalities with more than 8 million inhabitants. Only São Paulo with 12,396,372 inhabitants has 55 councillors. The city of Rio de Janeiro, the second most populous in Brazil (6,775,561 according to IBGE’s estimates for 2021), has 53 councillors.
• 5
  See, for example, the report produced by the NGO Transparência Brasil in 2009, which classified 91% of the legislative ‘output’ as irrelevant. Available at https://www.nossasaopaulo.org.br/portal/files/PLsSP TransparenciaBrasil.pdf. Consulted 28 June 2022.
• 6
  As stipulated by the Internal Regulations of the Municipal Council, the convocation of ceremonial sessions, when not made directly by the President, requires the endorsement of a third of the councillors (Article 194) while the concession of honorary titles requires the endorsement of two thirds (Articles 347 and 348), which amount to 19 and 37 signatures, respectively from councillors for each application.
• 7
  To obtain this figure, we multiplied the minimum required number of endorsements for each type of document by the annual average volume (commemorations require an absolute majority of councillors, or 28 signatures: the other requirements are described above): (900 x 28) + (156 x 19) + (90 x 37).
• 8
  Something that inevitably threatened to invert the relation of causality in what we observed was whether the high volume of documents had motivated the current form of organisation or whether the current form of organisation had stimulated an increase in the volume of initiatives.
• 9
  Pixo, a term derived from the word pichação, graffiti, is a form of graphic expression, traditionally adopted by marginalised urban groups, applied to urban walls and buildings. Frequently compared to graffiti, the pixo is characterised by political messages and by the elaboration of unique orthographic styles, sometimes rendering the text illegible to lay passers-by.
• 10
  The comissionados are public workers from the direct and indirect administration and from any level of the Federation, who are ‘loaned’ by the parent body to perform functions in another body. As a result, they can work in another public entity without giving up their original affiliation (and, very often, the salary and benefits received from the parent body). The practice is widespread in Brazil’s public sector and, in the case of the São Paulo Municipal Council, it is fairly common for workers from city hall (the prefeitura) to be commissioned in the council, especially since they earn a generous bonus for providing their services in the legislature.
• 11
  Until the 1988 Constitution, which prohibited the modality of direct administration, the council still hired people through contracts under the CLT (Consolidation of Labour Laws) in processes without any guarantee of impartiality. In practice, people who had a relationship with a councillor would ask for a job and ended up being hired and working in the council, frequently performing tasks similar to those of the statutory public workers.

• Translated by David Rodgers

• Dossier editors

  Carla Costa Teixeira (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3792-9687); Cristiane Brum Bernardes (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5367-3047); Emma Crewe (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0109-219X)

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  04 Sept 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  30 June 2022
• Accepted
  25 Oct 2022