Note for discussion sessions 6-7

Bourdieu – Studying state as a field?

Bourdieu’s transcribed and translated lecture rises a very important question – ‘how to think about the state when we are already thought of by it?’ Bourdieu engages with this question by claiming that there is no analytical purchase outside state to ‘study state’, because those who study it are already the products of state in some way or the other. Social sciences, he argues are themselves the projects of state and those who engage with the state problems are only thinking within the framework provided by state and do little to move beyond it. One way of circumventing this circularity, he suggests, is to enquire into the genesis of state in its historic contingency and recognize it as the possibility that was actualized over other possibilities at the time of its origin. By doing so, we would not misrecognize state as ‘the most natural form of social and political organization’; instead we would be able to see its cultural arbitrariness. He opines that this enquiry into its genesis is a very important prerequisite for any kind of disciplinary engagement with problems that emerge at the intersection of state and society. Further the presumptions behind the actualized possibility [that is state] should be understood and reconstructed in order to visibilize other possibilities.

Speaking of the structure of state, Bourdieu’s thoughts on state and how it needs to be studied falls within the theoretical paradigm he uses to study society. The concepts of field, forms of capital, habitus, embodiment, misrecognition are all present in this lecture. Balancing the powers wielded by social structure and individual agency, he does not make either of the two deterministic of the other, but is keen on showing how they are intertwined in ways more complex that we would like to acknowledge. This is the charge of his theoretical approach to state. Throughout the lecture, he draws our attention to two aspects of the state – the objective that operates at the structural level and the subjective which operates at individual and cognitive level. He regards state as a meta capital, a concentration of all kinds of capital, an overarching entity that organizes and regulates all of social life within it. He takes example of school to show how the organizational structure produces effects at the mental and subjective level when individuals embody and function with an implicit understanding of rules governing the field [that is school]. Objective organizational structures produce corresponding mental structures which bring state into existence and make people recognize it and respond and act within its boundaries. This reflection of state that is present at the subjective level as a mental structure enabling us all to act with certain knowledge is what makes it difficult to understand state according to Bourdieu. The resonances of this argument can be identified in the essay by Althusser on ideological state apparatuses which we read in the last session.

The symbolic value of the state functions as a transcendental value that wields nominal authority over individuals without any external reference. Over time it becomes so naturalized that we misrecognize it as the only possibility and therefore do not question its existence or foundational principles. The problems studied by social scientists only become problems of state that take for granted the structure that produces them. Hence the findings of research only serve as an addition to the knowledge of state rather than critiquing its very necessity.

While Bourdieu is successful to some extent in identifying the logical flaw inherent in any study of state, he is not so efficient in throwing light on what kind of knowledge is possible if we choose the route suggested by him and enquire into the genesis of the state and reconstruct its other possibilities that were erased at its institution. By gesturing towards an all encompassing theory that explains the whole of society within the state, is he not rendering futile that entire theoretical paradigm that can identify the contingency and unnaturalness of state, but cannot yield any further theoretical ground for its critique? Balancing out the structural and agential elements might offer a more comprehensive and complex understanding of state, but it does not theoretically offer insights as to how to understand the problems that are part of or responses to state. Is proving state idea as historically contingent theoretically more incisive in understanding the state produced problems? Would not all problems then have similar answers that only enlighten the larger scope of the problem but do very little by the way of attending to their specificities? Or is Bourdieu helpful only to understand the larger historical context of state and gain knowledge of its overall functioning but not deal with the specific problems that are produced by the state? I strongly feel that the theoretical scope of his insights is limited for doing historical and comparative studies of states and at best may help to contextualize the state specific problems.

Bureaucracy and everyday state

While the readings deal with distinctly different forms of the State, the connecting thread is perhaps the experience of the entity of the State by various actors- some within the state, some outside the ambit of the state and some in an ambiguous fuzzy place between being state and non-state actors.

Anjaria’s piece on street hawkers forces us to re-think the distinctions between legitimate and illegitmate in thinking of state, and citizenship. By paying attention to ways in which hawkers enact citizenship through acts outside the formal regulatory apparatus of the state, the piece unpacks for us the ways in which people relate to the State. For instance, a protest by hawkers becomes a collaborative exercise between lower level public officials and the hawkers. The collaborative nature of the public spectacle does not make it devoid of politics- instead, it gives rise to a certain kind of politics, where the State needs to be both confronted as well as collaborated with. Even as Anjaria pays attention to various unofficial arrangements hawkers cultivate with state-representatives at the lower levels of bureaucratic hierarchy and urges us to think about what maybe an “intimate state”, he makes a few qualifications. There is explicit recognition that paying attention to the unofficial forms of negotiation could end up trivialising extortionary practices and romanticisation of being outside the law. This is an important qualification, for in thinking about the extraordinary state, even as we recognise how substantive claims of citizenship are articulated in the unofficial and extra-legal, the existence of force and unequal power relationships cannot be glossed over. That said, Anjaria’s observations offer several possibilities to think about the State. From the pertinent observation that low-level municipal workers and police constables and hawkers inhabit intersecting social worlds, to the ways in which paper-records created by the State as means to count a population, can be turned into records to stake claim to legitimate claims over a space, ethnographic observations in the article offer many useful insights. Anjaria argues that the project of anthropology of state has been to develop an analytical perspective that always questions the boundedness of the state without denying its effects. He seems to be pushing the question in a different direction when he asks about how people inhabit strategies of governance.

In Sharma’s piece, the positioning of Mahila Samkhya as NGO or GONGO to different actors explicitly foregrounds the ambiguities with the idea of the State.  Such ambiguity of positioning offers several possibilities for MS representatives. As with the case of the Kol tribe women, who learn bureaucratic procedures and are able to retain a piece of prime land with assistance from MS representatives, government- or at least strategies of bureaucratic governance- can be empowering.  At the same time, similar strategies could be instruments of domination (When MS representatives use MHRD letterheads to intimidate women’s groups into compliance, for instance). Placed organisationally between the government and the non-government, Mahila Samkhya offers several possibilities to think about where the State lies. A suggestion made in the piece is that the State as an entity works along the axis of class, caste and gender. A question that emerges is- how does one tell the State apart from social hierarchies? (Neoliberalism- formation of subjects)

Emma Tarlo is unpacking the state in an entirely different way by looking at objects filed away in a dusted room. The attempt at look at slum clearance and sterilisation drives during emergency through official documents, and interpretations of these documents, occasionally by representatives of the state, is an attempt to locate the everyday state in the pragmatic world of everyday bureaucracy. She discusses the problem of studying emergency given the lack of material available, nature of the available material in which we can get glimpses of emergency in its sanitized form. Her effort is one of extracting and bringing the flavour of the times out of collective silence. Emergency as event was spectacular in nature, and received attention for wrong reasons. It is the memory that Indian state does not want to archive. She has to read against the grain of the documents that record the period of emergency. The available files gave her access to the silence. However, she cautions - legitimacy of these documents are not devoid of discrepancies implying that neither the documents published during emergency, nor in the period following emergency could be taken as a fact of what happened. Regardless of this facticity of those documents, they are very important testimonies of how bureaucratic processes worked during that period. She shows how documents are not the proofs of facts; instead they are proofs of how bureaucracy manufactures facts. This poses methodologically a very important question - how to study such state spectacles which have been silenced or heavily distorted?

The review essay by Hull maps the anthropological treatment of bureaucratic documents and opens up the avenue for understanding them in ways more than just treating them as mere records of social reality. His approach to bureaucratic documents considers them as more than semiotic technologies through which state understands those it governs. He wants us to see the mediating nature of the bureaucratic documents as they circulate among the officials - state agents and the people. Documents, he says, are not simply “instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, and even the organizations themselves”. When we analyse the documents as more than just ‘instruments of representation’ we can see how representations construct objects and how negotiating these representations is the way in which society comprehends and constantly redefines state and its boundaries. Thus documents are central to the way a society imagines state. Further, bringing documents into the ethnographic framework also helps address the ‘problem of determining the boundaries of organizations’. It is particularly useful to those doing institutional ethnographies. Scholars by closely looking at bureaucratic documents and making tem one of their sources of enquiry can overcome the conventional boundaries laid down by the anthropology between formal and informal structures and organizations. The final section of this essay points to some interesting insights into newer modes of bureaucratic documentation such as electronic databases and resistance from within the bureaucracy for such changes. It takes a very measured approach to documentation and urges us to see the continuity and the novelty of the newer electronic forms simultaneously, challenging rhetoric of technological revolution and claims of transparency of e-governance schemes. The aesthetics of electronic modes of documentation resembles that of paper form.

Hull demonstrates some of the propositions he puts forward in the review article in his essay on Islamabad City Development Authority and its everyday functioning with the neighbouring village of BQB. He shows how records have a certain kind of fixity far removed from their referential reality, and they are used by both officials and the villagers as tools to achieve material benefits. He juxtaposes the bureaucratic simplicity of BQB area and its people on paper and their complex social reality on ground. The bureaucratic list visibilizing the people of this area is a constant work in progress that entails adding and modifying the list several times over based on the negotiations of people with the official bureaucracy. He places at the centre of the narrative a dynamic bureaucratic document – in this case a list, which is subject to constant modification and change. The list mobilizes around it people and activities regularly that is indicative of the routine functioning of government and bureaucracy everywhere.

Akhil Gupta pays close attention to the routinized practices of different branches and levels of state. Akhil Gupta is quite enamoured of disaggregated idea of state. He looks at development programmes aimed at alleviation of poverty in the context where they have failed in spite of repeated efforts and schemes of government. Poverty as a structural problem of the state, he opines, suffers from the poverty of attention. He sees poverty as violence which is structural and impersonal in form for which one cannot identify the perpetrator. He draws on Foucault [the concept of bio power] and Agamben [Homo Sacer and state of exception]. He critiques Foucault’s idea of bio power for failing to account for violence implicit in it. While Agamben’s Homo Sacer resembles closely the poor in the sense that they are expendable and their killing does not violate the law or the legitimacy of the sovereign, the death of people living in poverty does not amount to violation of law. However for Agamben, Homo Sacer and violence exist due to the exclusion from the state. In case of India, the paradox of poverty is that the poor are killed despite their inclusion in the projects of national sovereignty. He is departing from both Foucault and Agamben in his refusal to see state as one unified entity. If state indeed is a disaggregated entity manifesting itself in many layers, Gupta pushes us to see the methodological challenges in studying state as a layered and disaggregated structure – in its translocalism, pluricenteredness, ubiquity and reification. In dismantling the state to its bare minimum, Gupta seems to have made it difficult to see it as a unified entity [which is how it projects itself]. Although state is experienced in its parts, there is a unifying feature about state agencies which separates it from its citizens. How do we grapple with this projected dimension of state? - is the question we should debate.  

Priya, Savitha and Rashmi