Readings for first class, February 5

1.       Why an anthropology of the state?                                            February 5

Philip Abrams, Notes on the difficulty of studying the state. Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1):58-89, 1988 (1977). In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 112-130.

Timothy Mitchell, The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics. American Political Science Review 85(1): 77-96, 1991.

C.J. Fuller and John Harris 2000 For an anthropology of the modern Indian state. In V. Benei and C. Fuller, Everyday State and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Social Science Press), 1-30.

Akhil Gupta, Blurred boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state. American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402, 1995.

Akhil Gupta, David Nugent and Shreyas Sreenath, State, corruption, postcoloniality: a conversation with Akhil Gupta on the 20th anniversary of ‘Blurred Boundaries’. American Ethnologist 42(4): 581-91, 2015.

Marx’s theory of the state:

http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/karl-marx-the-state.html

Louis Althusser, Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: notes towards an investigation (1971). In Sharma and Gupta, 86-111.

Max Weber, Bureaucracy. In Sharma and Gupta, pp 49-70 [skim].

About the Course

This seminar will provide an introduction to the growing body of anthropological work on the state, together with some of the classical and contemporary theorists who have informed this scholarship. Themes covered will include: the formation of the modern nation-state; power, ideology and hegemony; state violence and mechanisms of control; bureaucratic practices such as state planning and policy making; and the 'everyday state'. Through intensive discussion of selected readings, students will engage with a distinctively anthropological perspective and methodological approach to understanding of the modern state, marked by a focus on everyday practices and meanings, structure and agency, discourse and ideology, and the micropolitics of power.