Sovereign Bodies

by Hansen, Thomas Blom

• ISBN13: 9780691121185
• ISBN10: 0691121184
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-11
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally.Sovereign Bodiesshifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unstable whose efficacy depends less on formal rules than on repeated acts of violence. Following the editors' introduction are fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the globe that analyze cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, as well as practices of citizenship and belonging--in South Africa, Peru, India, Mexico, Cyprus, Norway, and also among transnational Chinese and Indian populations. Sovereign Bodies enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana Mariacute;a Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
List of Contributors	ix
Introduction	1	(38)
Thomas Blom Hansen
Finn Stepputat
Race, Law, and Citizenship
Territorializing the Nation and ``Integrating the Indian'': ``Mestizaje'' in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture	39	(22)
Ana Maria Alonso
Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru	61	(21)
Finn Stepputat
Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political	82	(21)
Partha Chatterjee
Death, Anxiety, and Rituals of State
Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State	103	(17)
Yael Navaro-Yashin
Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State	120	(28)
Jean Comaroff
John L. Comaroff
Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure	148	(21)
Achille Mbembe
Body, Locality, and Informal Sovereignty
Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India	169	(23)
Thomas Blom Hansen
The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth	192	(26)
Lars Buur
Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town	218	(23)
Steffen Jensen
Postcolonial Citizenship in the Empire
Citizenship and Empire	241	(16)
Barry Hindess
Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West	257	(19)
Aihwa Ong
Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State	276	(15)
Peter van der Veer
Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway	291	(21)
Oivind Fuglerud
Suspended Spaces---Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp	312	(21)
Simon Turner
Bibliography	333	(30)
Index	363