States of Imagination

States of Imagination

Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State

  • Autor: Hansen, Thomas Blom; Stepputat, Finn; Steinmetz, George; Adams, Julia
  • Editor: Duke University Press
  • Colección: Politics, History, and Culture
  • ISBN: 9780822328018
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822381273
  • Lugar de publicación:  Durham , Estados Unidos
  • Año de publicación digital: 2001
  • Mes: Diciembre
  • Páginas: 432
  • DDC: 306.2
  • Idioma: Ingles
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle.
This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history.

Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

  • CONTENTS
  • Preface
  • Introduction: States of Imagination
  • I STATE AND GOVERNANCE
    • ‘‘Demonic Societies’’: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty
    • Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India
    • The Battlefield and the Prize: ANC’s Bid to Reform the South African State
    • Imagining the State as a Space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador
  • II STATE AND JUSTICE
    • The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation
    • Reconstructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory: The Work of the TRC
    • Rethinking Citizenship: Reforming the Law in Postwar Guatemala
    • Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai
  • III STATE AND COMMUNITY
    • Before History and Prior to Politics: Time, Space, and Territory in the Modern Peruvian Nation-State
    • Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala
    • In the Name of the State? Schools and Teachers in an Andean Province
    • The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan
    • Public Secrets, Conscious Amnesia, and the Celebration of Autonomy for Ladakh
  • Bibliography
  • About the Contributors
  • Index

SUSCRÍBASE A NUESTRO BOLETÍN

Al suscribirse, acepta nuestra Politica de Privacidad