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].