Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
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- Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the state.
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- Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
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- Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.
Trade Review"[Sharma and Gupta] have compiled a timely, useful and dense collection of classical and more recent texts that cover the field, as I know it, pretty well." (
Critique of Anthropology, 2009)
"The volume presents an innovative and greatly needed introduction to an interdisciplinary research programme between anthropology and political science." (Discourse & Society, February 2008)
"[This) volume's refreshing theoretical approach and range of empirical examples should make it a valuable teaching and reference book for all those concerned with the challenging questions posed by the state." (Political Studies Review)
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements.
Organization of the Book.
Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization.
Part I: Theoretical Maps: The “Classics”.
Section Introduction.
1. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation): Louis Althusser.
2. Selections from the Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci.
3. Bureaucracy: Max Weber.
4. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State: Philip Abrams.
5. Governmentality: Michel Foucault.
6. Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies: Nikolas Rose.
Part II: Ethnographic Mappings.
Section I: Bureaucracy/Governmentality.
7. Finding the Man in the State: Wendy Brown.
8. Society, Economy, and the State Effect: Timothy Mitchell.
9. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State: Akhil Gupta.
Section II: Development/Planning.
10. Cities, People, and Language: James Scott.
11. The Anti-Politics Machine: Jim Ferguson.
Section III: Welfare/Warfare/Law/Citizenship.
12. The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community: Ananya Bhattarcharjee.
13. Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement: Transnationalism, Naturalization, and U.S. Immigration Politics: Susan Bibler Coutin.
14. Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis: Catherine Lutz.
Section IV: Popular Culture.
15. Popular Culture and the State: Stuart Hall.
16. The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony: Achille Mbembe.
Index
