The Anthropology of the State: A Reader

by Editor: Aradhana Sharma (Wesleyan University); Editor: Akhil Gupta (Stanford University)

• ISBN13: 9781405155359
• ISBN10: 1405155353
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Organization of the Book

Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization

Theoretical Maps: The ôClassicsö

Section Introduction

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)

Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Bureaucracy

Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State

Governmentality

Governing ôAdvancedö Liberal Democracies

Ethnographic Mappings

Bureaucracy/Governmentality

Finding the Man in the State

Society, Economy, and the State Effect

Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State

Development/Planning

Cities, People, and Language

The Anti-Politics Machine

Welfare/Warfare/Law/Citizenship

The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community

Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement: Transnationalism, Naturalization, and U.S. Immigration Politics

Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis

Popular Culture

Popular Culture and the State

The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony

Index

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