Article How to study bureaucracies ethnographically? Thomas Bierschenk Johannes Gutenberg-Universit€ at, Germany Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan LASDEL: Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le De ´veloppement Local, Niger; EHESS: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France Abstract We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you understand the context in which they act. Based on intensive fieldwork and under- standing ethnography as a form of grounded-theory production, to explore this ‘ratio- nality in context’ of bureaucrats should be a major research objective. As in day-to-day intra-organisational practice and in internal interactions between bureaucrats, state bureaucracies function largely as any other modern organisation, the anthropology of bureaucracy does not differ that much from the anthropology of organisations. One of the major achievements of the latter has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organisation and real practices, official regulations and informal norms in organisations ‘at work’. This focus on informal practices, pragmatic rules and practical norms provides the main justification for the utilisation of ethnographic methods. Corresponding author: Thomas Bierschenk, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg-Universit€ at, Mainz, Germany. Email: biersche@uni-mainz.de Critique of Anthropology 0(0) 1–15 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308275X19842918 journals.sagepub.com/home/coa