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Locating the State:Between Region and History
Title / Series / Name
Annual Review of Anthropology
Publication Volume
53
Publication Issue
1
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Eastern Europe
South Asia
State power
capitalism
everyday state practices
neoliberalism
region
Cultural Studies
Anthropology
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
South Asia
State power
capitalism
everyday state practices
neoliberalism
region
Cultural Studies
Anthropology
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27982
Abstract
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-10-21
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1146/annurev-Anthro-101819-110304