States and Citizens: Anthropological Perspectives

This course asks: How can we conceptualize `states’? And how can one study ethnographically something as vast and difficult to grasp as a `state’? These are two different but related aspects of our approach to `states’ in this course: conceptual and ethnographic, both necessary and important to relate to each other. We will examine concepts, and look at examples of practices and processes in a number of significant domains, in order to comprehend states, in their variety, in a distinctively anthropological manner. Most of our central readings are by anthropologists, and involve the relating to each other of concepts and ethnography. Central topics through which we will look at this conjunction will include everyday practices; culture and state ritual; law and regulation; personhood and agency; hidden and overt mechanisms of power; persistent structures, emergent and mixed (state-private and other) forms of governance. Along the way we look at examples of some of the rubrics currently most often applied to states: the `stable’ state; the `would-be’ state (`Islamic state’?), the `failed’ state. Ethnographically, we will especially (but not exclusively) focus on what are considered developing states, by which is meant here: those which offer fewer entitlements and have penetrated less completely into the daily lives of their citizens, than is customary in the state systems of better-off countries. Thus the course is for students of the social sciences and related areas of practice such as development studies and social research.