CONTENTS Foreword Bruce Kapferer Preface iv PART I. THEORETICAL APPROACHES 1. Introduction Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad pg 1 2. Sovereignty, the Spatial Politics of Security, and Gender: Looking North and South from the US-Mexico Border Ana M. Alonso pg 43 PART II. A VIEW FROM COMMUNITIES 3. Chiefs and Bureaucrats in the Making of Empire: A Drama from the Transkei, South Africa, October 1880 Clifton Crais pg 87 4. State Formation through Development in Post-apartheid South Africa Knut G. Nustad pg 141 5. Negotiated Dictatorship: The Building of the Trujillo State in the Southwestern Dominican Republic Christian Krohn-Hansen pg 167 6. The Materiality of State Effects: An Ethnography of a Road in the Peruvian Andes Penelope Harvey pg 216 7. Contradictory Notions of the State: Returned Refugees in Guatemala Kristi Anne St¿len pg 248 PART III: A VIEW FROM STATE BODIES 8. Counting on State Subjects: State Formation and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Mexico Helga Baitenmann pg 292 9. 'A Speech that the Entire Ministry may Stand for': On Generating State Voice Iver B. Neumann pg 337 10. 'Better Safe than Sorry': Legislating Assisted Conception in Norway Marit Melhuus pg 364 11. The State of the State in Europe, or, 'What is the European Union that Anthropologists Should be Mindful of it'? Cris Shore pg 401 Contributors pg 438 Index Foreword Bruce Kapferer The question of the state has always been at the centre of political and philosophical debate but interest has intensified of late across the social sciences. This has much to do with attacks on modernism, the state being seen as the arch culprit in the human crises, destructions and disasters that have befallen humankind throughout its history and most of all in the more recent centuries. Recent political and economic developments - the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and a new US militarism, the European Union and its reaction to the Treaty of Westphalia, contemporary globalisation, the further growth of corporate power, the Internet - have dramatically affected the nature of state power. How this is so is a major problem to be examined, as are the human and social consequences that follow from the redrawing of the nature of state orders and power. The importance of such enquiry cannot be overstressed. The state, at least the imagination of the state (the real or fantasised effect of the state on human existence) has likely been of major influence on the lives of human beings from the very beginnings of human history, even for those peoples who refused state forms of control and order. It has been integral within human subjectivity and part of the dynamics vital in the creation of human relations (even in contexts of the rejection of any kind of state control, as Clastres once discussed). In some approaches (particularly since the rise of modern nationalism) the state has frequently been conceived as virtually synonymous with the imaginary of society. I am suggesting that an understanding of the state is crucial to an exploration of human being, for the social sciences especially, and that it is receiving a renewed focus of interest is appropriate to its centrality. This is especially so in the current situation of what today appears to many commentators and scholars alike as major changes of an almost cosmological and ontological quality that is taking place in contemporary state orders and the encompassing political and social fields of their operation. Of course I am talking about the state in over general and in a far too uniform way. The state has taken widely diverse forms throughout history and the kind of state, or modern or contemporary state, that the essays in this volume address is a recent invention, although still highly diverse in its shaping. Within that sphere too easily glossed as the West, what is discussed as the state has taken quite different forms. The highly centralised forms that grew up in Europe and frequently among its colonised outer regions are, perhaps, to be distinguished from the US form, as De Tocqueville posited. While many might contest this, I think a strong argument could be made that the currently globally dominant US form that is certainly effecting changes in state formations throughout the world has dimensions in its imaginary and in its practice quite distinct from its neighbours across the Atlantic. This was a powerful imaginative intent of its founders and in numerous aspects it was already postmodern. I suggest that the experience of the state and the way the state is subjectivised in the US is often very different from that in many other parts of the world. Such an observation is relevant to many current discussions of the state which tend to conceive of it from within a dominant North American postmodern perspective and which not infrequently, even if subconsciously, becomes an ideal standard against which others are measured. But all the above does not get us very close to an understanding as to what exactly we understand by the state or the often very different formations that we might describe as involving state processes. This is one of the important contributions of the essays in this volume. Here there is a concern with the practices through which the state materially makes its appearance whether this be through the technological construction of lines of communication (and control), the bureaucratic inscription of subjects, the presentation of official policy, the production of refugees, etc. There is a stress on the state in its numerous modalities of formation whereby the complexity of the phenomenon often far too simply glossed as the state is manifested. Here there is an important shift away from the state as a transcendent imagined ideality of a Hegelian kind which may be too disjunct from the concrete in which the state is materially realised and comes to have its embodied effects. The idea of the state and the modern state is in many ways an imagined holism indeed along the lines that Hegel and many others have discussed. While it is imagined this does not mean that it is not real for it has reality both as an imaginary (as a spectre in human consciousness that has as such an effect on human action) and as a materialisation, a force (Spirit?) in the constitution of persons and in the manifold arrangements of human existence. Perhaps it is of the same order as other constructed totalities such as society or community in the social sciences. These, for example, focus on those dimensions affecting individual action such as identity and the institutional and relational. Notions like the state, society and community have the character of Deleuzian virtuals (yet thoroughly real) in their abstract totalisation but are simultaneously actually evident, indeed empirically evident, in the diversity of particular human practices. The state is an idea - and, as the chapters in this book indicate, an idea with numerous different histories and conceptualisations. It is not to be reduced to power (although this is the key feature of the state upon which the idea concentrates) and neither to particular organisations of government or of rule (although these are the commanding centres and most material manifestations of the state). The state is these things and more, a general and diverse forming of power, authority and control, the critical force defining the political, that has sovereign claim (or is yielded such claim) to constitute the conditions of existence of those brought within its realm. The reality of the state is to be grasped ethnographically both in its imaginary and in the concreteness of practices that have a state relation or reference. This forms the major contribution of the essays in this book. The contribution is all the more because of the focus on contemporary states, the modern state. As the editors stress, much ethnography, especially in anthropology, has until recently been focussed on archaic forms, usually small in scale and concentrating on central institutions such as kings and chiefs. A strong evolutionism is present in such approaches. Many of the ethnographic studies of non-Western state systems carried the implication that they were preliminary and lower forms of modern state forms in Europe and North America. This sense is continuing and is evident in current accounts of so-called 'failed' states and their humanity destroying excess. These do not so much critique the idea of the modern state as indicate that failed states, in Africa, for example, are merely underdeveloped possibilities of the state. Modernisation perspectives continue into postmodern conceptions of state practice, often masquerading as anti-state arguments: for instance, many of the critiques of state practice from within the situation of North America that culturally or ideologically display many of the tenets of US exceptionalism. The ethnographies presented here explore practices that reveal the distinctiveness of certain modern state formations but also the similarities that may extend across apparent difference. Dictatorships are distinct from democratic states yet the former no less than the latter operate a dialectics of consent that is both socially constitutive and reproductive of state power. As recent events have dramatically shown, the removal of dictators or forced regime change, does not negate the socio-political dynamics that were set in place which can transmute into heightened virulent form in the contradictory spaces occasioned by changes in the agents of state power. The state is never separate from the social world in which it operates and the ethnographies in this volume explore the intricacies of such relations. The importance of the ethnographic position in this book is that it engages with the numerous practices in which the state is revealed and becomes inscribed in persons and their relations. It is only through such an ethnography that a thorough understanding of the modern state in its diverse formations can be grasped, as well as the complex nature of its effects on the populations it may contain. I underline the importance of an ethnography of the state as extending beyond certain kinds of philosophising, once more in the ascendant, that while of fundamental importance gains its insights through re-examining well-established texts or else depending on the constructions of those in dominant positions who, these days, are engaged in the control of media presentations upon which critics of state practice have sometimes become over-reliant. These ethnographic essays not only present original information but more significantly have the merit of transcending received wisdom or intellectual fashions. This should be the potential of anthropological ethnography, especially which has the advantage of the analyst being consciously and analytically located in the contexts of practice that are to be comprehended. Thus the ethnography is not necessarily illustrative of what is already well-known, yet another case to add to the pile, but opens up understandings that are thoroughly dependent on analysis in situ. As Max Gluckman recommended for a particular anthropology that he was instrumental in promulgating, ethnography is more than producing illustrative case material but is the anthropological method whereby regnant theory can be queried and new understanding developed that is grounded in the phenomenon being examined. The editors of this book stress the new directions that the anthropology of the state is taking one, which is acutely aware of the numerous perspectives that have taken place in related disciplines and fields of enquiry. The re-insistence of the anthropological stress on culture achieved through comparative understanding is particularly appealing. It is only through comparison that particular conceptual or theoretical approaches can be upheld, more finely honed, or ultimately discarded. The state is an artefact of culture and in its diversities engages assumptions and practical logics that expand from this fact. In the anthropological vision that I personally recommend it is not that state practice is meaningful, one sense of a stress on culture, but that it embeds compositional, constructional and especially orientational doxa and logics which an ethnographic approach such as those displayed here perhaps can best uncover. It is through the doxa of state practices that the state in its imaginary and materiality has effects, many of them unintended, much violence being a feature. I add here that the concentration on power, which is the stress of those who focus on the state, can overlook the fact that power, even the power of the state, can arise from practices that may have no immediate or initial link to the interests of power. A cultural perspective should be alive to this possibility. While much state power operates hegemonically, as Gramsci, Foucault and numerous others have insisted, this is a vision of state practice as always subordinating culture (however this is defined) to power. But the stronger meaning of culture in much anthropology refers to those meaningful social practices that are as much constitutive of powerful effects as themselves the effect of power. To concentrate on the cultural processes of the agents of state practice is to indicate trajectories of their effective commitments that are already directed along certain lines with particular potentialities before they may be intentionally engaged to use them in certain consciously specific ways. State practices as cultural practices have much more to them than that which would always intentionally reduce them to the interests of power. The cultural perspective in anthropology, often arraigned against essentialism or foundationalism, as in common criticisms of economism, should also be alive to the risks of reducing phenomena such as the state merely to power. Power itself is emergent or situated in a diverse field of practices of which the anthropological attention to culture is acutely aware. This rich collection of essays opens out to new horisons of thought on the question of the state. It is a demonstration of the authority of ethnography and the challenge that such work may offer to already well-tried positions that need radical re-examination. This is so today in which the very idea of the state is being reconfigured while new formations of power, control and sovereignty are coming into more prominent being. These last certainly have state effects if not states in any conventional or traditional sense. The excellent studies here go some considerable way to laying a new foundation for a reinvigorated anthropology of the state. PREFACE How do we conceptualise state formations, and is it possible to study these processes ethnographically? The Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo generously provided funds for a workshop, Explorations of the state: Considerations from critical anthropology/ethnography, in October 2002, to discuss these questions. Our initial call for papers met with an overwhelming response, which clearly demonstrated for us that many anthropologists were grappling with these issues. The papers that were presented at the workshop indicated the breath of issues that arise when anthropologists engage with the state as an object of study. We wish to thank both presenters and participants for two days of intensely stimulating discussions. The essays by Helga Baitenmann, Penelope Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen, Iver B. Neumann, Knut G. Nustad, Kristi Anne St¿len and Marit Melhuus were given as papers at the workshop. The papers by Ana Alonso, Clifton Crais and Cris Shore have been added. Bruce Kapferer, who participated at the workshop, was asked to write a foreword. Clifton Crais' chapter was originally published in American Historical Review, Vol. 108 no. 4, 2003, and we are grateful to the American Historical Association for their permission to reprint it. Knut wishes to thank Diakonhjemmet University College, Oslo, for providing time for finalising the manuscript. Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad Oslo, December 2004.
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