The Anthropology of the State A Reader

by Sharma, Aradhana; Gupta, Akhil

• ISBN13: 9781405114677
• ISBN10: 1405114673
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-01-24
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of "the state". Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the "state". Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject. Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

Author Biography

Aradhana Sharma is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Wesleyan University.

Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. His previous publications include Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (ed. 1997), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (ed. 1997), Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (1998), and Caste and Outcast (ed. 2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Organization of the Book	xi
Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization	1	(42)
Part I Theoretical Genealogies	43	(120)
Introduction	45	(4)
Bureaucracy	49	(22)
Max Weber
State and Civil Society	71	(15)
Antonio Gramsci
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)	86	(26)
Louis Althusser
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State	112	(19)
Philip Abrams
Governmentality	131	(13)
Michel Foucault
Governing ``Advanced'' Liberal Democracies	144	(19)
Nikolas Rose
Part II Ethnographic Mappings	163	(2)
Section I Bureaucracy and Governmentality	165	(78)
Society, Economy, and the State Effect	169	(18)
Timothy Mitchell
Finding the Man in the State	187	(24)
Wendy Brown
Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State	211	(32)
Akhil Gupta
Section II Planning and Development	243	(44)
Cities, People, and Language	247	(23)
James C. Scott
The Anti-Politics Machine	270	(17)
James Ferguson
Section III Violence, Law, and Citizenship	287	(70)
Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis	291	(19)
Catherine Lutz
Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement: Transnationalism, Naturalization, and US Immigration Politics	310	(27)
Susan Bibler Coutin
The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community	337	(20)
Anannya Bhattacharjee
Section IV Popular Culture	357	(44)
Popular Culture and the State	360	(21)
Stuart Hall
The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony	381	(20)
Achille Mbembe
Index	401