Animating the state: Discourses of authority and intimacy in the Colombian Agrarian Bank

The mid 1990s marked a period of transformation in relationships between the Colombian state and indigenous communities. As part of a broad program of 'neoliberal' reform, in 1995 the central state tightened the credit policies of the Caja Agraria (state Agrarian Bank) and in effect denied access to state-subsidized loans to indigenous (Guambiano) clients of the Bank. In denying Guambiano loan requests, Bank officials are obliged to implement state policies that appear contradictory at the local level. This dissertation examines the discourse strategies of indigenous clients and officials of the Agrarian Bank in the context of face-to-face interactions recorded in 1996--97.; The contradictions in state policies are partially mediated in the interactions by the deployment and embedding of several distinct participation frameworks (in Erving Goffman's terminology, 'footings') at different moments in the encounters. The moments in which officials deny Guambiano loan requests are characterized by a footing in which officials align themselves with the Agrarian Bank and animate an authoritative institutional voice. This footing proves to be unsustainable in many of the interactions, as Guambiano clients make moral claims on Bank services that serve to highlight the contradictions in state policies. Such Guambiano claims tend to key shifts to an embedded footing of 'bureaucratic intimacy' in which officials align themselves with Guambiano clients and in which the Bank and the Guambiano community appear as third persons. At still other moments in the interactions, the Guambiano community appears as a displaced interlocutor of Bank officials' talk. Because such a collective Guambiano interlocutor indexes Guambiano political power and criticisms of state policies, its emergence in the interactions renders the co-present client unalignable and precludes the stance of 'bureaucratic intimacy' taken up by officials at other moments of the interactions.; The complex intermingling of institutional and more 'personalistic' voices in the discourse in the Agrarian Bank is interpreted as a coherent discourse strategy for deflecting indigenous claims on state resources and positing a reified ontology of state presence. Theoretically, the dissertation shows how participation frameworks may be seen to causally mediate social forms in the micro-level details of face-to-face interaction.