No Authors Provided - The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Wiley Blackwell Readers in Anthropology)

As anthropology moves beyond the limits of so-called area studies, there is an increasing need for texts that do the work of synthesizing the literature while challenging more traditional or subdisciplinary approaches to anthropology. This is the object of this exciting new series, Blackwell Readers in Anthropology.

Each volume in the series offers seminal readings on a chosen theme and provides the finest, most thought-provoking recent works in the given thematic area. Many of these volumes bring together for the first time a body of literature on a certain topic. The series thus both presents definitive collections and investigates the very ways in which anthropological inquiry has evolved and is evolving.

1 The Anthropology of Media: A Reader

Edited by Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk

2 Genocide: An Anthropological Reader

Edited by Alexander Laban Hinton

3 The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture

Edited by Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga

4 Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology

Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois

5 Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader

Edited by Jennifer Robertson

6 Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader

Edited by June Nash

7 The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader

Edited by James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell

8 Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader

Edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo

9 The Anthropology of the State: A Reader

Edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta

Edited by

Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta

Dedication by Aradhana Sharma

For Vijay Dhawan

Dedication by Akhil Gupta

For two generations whose courage and can-do spirit is inspiring and infectious

My father, Jwa1a 1 Gupta and my daughter, Deeya Shivani Gupta

ix

xi

Max Weber

Antonio Gramsci

Louis Althusser

Philip Abrams

Michel Foucault

Nikolas Rose

Timothy Mitchell

Wendy Brown

Akhil Gupta

James C. Scott

James Ferguson

Catherine Lutz

Susan Bibler Coutin

Anannya Bhattacharjee

Stuart Hall

Achille Mbembe

This book is a result of the collaborative work of several individuals. Donald Moore and K. Sivaramakrishnan gave us helpful suggestions as we conceptualized this book. Anonymous reviewers guided the project through their detailed feedback on the introduction and the proposed contents. Lalaie Ameeriar and Aaron David Shaw provided Akhil Gupta with crucial research assistance. Purnima Mankekar read our introduction and contributed greatly to its substance and style. Akhil Gupta would also like to thank the South Asia Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for inviting him to present an earlier version of the introduction there. We are grateful to colleagues at Hawaii for their valuable comments. Jane Huber and Emily Martin at Blackwell are an inspiring editorial team. Not only did they make this project possible, but they provided invaluable input and support for the project right through to its final stages. We would not have been able to write this book without the support, encouragement, and critical engagement of all these colleagues, and we are grateful to each one of them. The mistakes are, of course, solely ours.

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

1 Max Weber, "Bureaucracy," pp. 956-1005 from G. Roth and C. Wittich, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. E. Fischoff, H. Gerth, A. M. Henderson, E Kolegar, C. Wright Mills, T. Parsons, M. Rheinstein, G. Roth, E. Shils, and C. Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.

2 Antonio Gramsci, "State and Civil Society," pp. 228-70 from Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York and London: International Publishers and Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.

3 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," pp. 127-86 from Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Copyright 0c 1971 by Monthly Review Press. Reprinted by permission of Monthly Review Foundation.

4 Philip Abrams, "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State," pp. 58-89 from Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1), March 1988 (1977). Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing.

5 Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," pp. 87-104 from G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead and Chicago: Harvester Wheatsheaf and University of Chicago Press, 1991. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

6 Nikolas Rose, "Governing `Advanced' Liberal Democracies," pp. 37-64 from A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and UCL Press, 1996. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

7 Timothy Mitchell, "Society, Economy, and the State Effect," pp. 76-97 from G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Used by permission of the publisher.

8 Wendy Brown, "Finding the Man in the State," pp. 166-96 from Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 1995 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

9 Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State," pp. 375-402 from American Ethnologist, 22(2), 1995. 1995 American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

10 James C. Scott, "Cities, People, and Language," pp. 53-83, 369-76 from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Yale University Press.

11 James Ferguson, "The Anti-Politics Machine," pp. 251-77, 302-13 from The AntiPolitics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

12 Catherine Lutz, "Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis," pp. 723-35 from American Anthropologist, 104(3), 2002. 2002, American Anthropologist Association. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

13 Susan Bibler Coutin, "Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement: Transnationalism, Naturalization, and US Immigration Politics," pp. 508-26 from American Ethnologist, 30(4), 2003. 2003, American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Used by permission.