Anthropology in the Margins of the State

338 Pages·2004·6.59 MB·English

by  Veena

Anthropology in the Margins
of the State
Edited, by Veena Das and Deborah Poole
O X FO R D
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O X F O R D
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies 3
Veena Das and Deborah Poole
Between Threat and Guarantee: Justice and Community
2
in the Margins of the Peruvian State
35
Deborah Poole
3 Checkpoint: Anthropology, Identity, and the State ?
6
Pradeep Jeganathan
4 Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances
of the Sierra Leonean State
81
Mariane C. Ferme
5 Anthropologist Discovers Legendary Two-Faced
Indian! Margins, the State, and Duplicity in
Postwar Guatemala
117
Diane Af. Nelson
AIDS and Witchcraft in Post-Apartheid South Africa
6 141
Adam Ashforth
7 Operability: Surgery at the Margin of the State
165
Lawrence Cohen
v
Contents
Productivity in the Margins: The Reconstitution
8
of State Power in the Chad Basin
9
1
Janet Roitman
The Signature of ihe State: The Paradox of Illegibility
9 225
Veen a Das
Contesting Displacement in Colombia: Citizenship
10
and State Sovereignty at the Margins
253
Victoria Sanford
Where Are the Margins of the State?
11 279
Talal Asad
References
289
Index
321
vi
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to offer our thanks to the staff of the School of
American Research, Santa Fe, and especially Leslie Shipman, for their
marvelous hospitality during the advanced seminar in which these
papers were discussed. Our colleagues and students at Johns Hopkins
University continue to provide a stimulating intellectual environ­
ment—we thank them for the many discussions that have seeped into
our writing. We are grateful to Becky Daniels, who cheerfully com­
pleted the final task of formatting and consolidating the reference list.
And we thank Janies Brooks and Catherine Cocks at SAR Press for
efficiently steering the manuscript through publication.
Veen a Das
Deborah Poole
Ml

Anthropology in the Margins
o f the State

1
State and Its Margins
Comparative Ethnographies
Veena Das and Deborah Poole
This book is about margins, the places from which we seek to
understand what counts as the study of the state in anthropology. The
chapters collected here began as part of a School of American
Research advanced seminar. There we asked anthropologists working
on different regions to reflect on what would constitute the ethnogra­
phy of the state as embedded in practices, places, and languages con­
sidered to be at the margins of the nation-state. Although we invited
anthropologists whose work focused on regions that have been dramat­
ically affected by recent political and economic reforms, we were inter­
ested in moving away from the idea that these reforms had somehow
produced a weakening or shrinking of the forms of regulation and
belonging that supposedly constitute the modern nation-state. O ur
analytical and descriptive strategy was to distance ourselves from the
entrenched image of the state as a rationalized administrative form of
political organization that becomes weakened or less fully articulated
along its territorial or social margins. Instead, we asked seminar partic­
ipants to reflect on how the practices and politics of life in these areas
shaped the political, regulatory, and disciplinary practices that consti­
tute, somehow, that thing we call “the state.”
3
Veena Das and Deborah Poole
As a discipline that itself has often been considered to occupy a
marginal voice in Western political theory, anthropology offers an ideal
point of departure for the radical rethinking of the state that a view
from the margins requires. Anthropology is frequently configured as a
discipline that speaks for (or at times with) those populations that have
been marginalized |by the political and economic strictures of colonial
and postcolonial rule. Moreover, ethnography is a mode of knowing
that privileges experience—often going into realms of the social that
are not easily discernible within the more formal protocols used by
many other disciplines. As such, ethnography offers a unique perspec­
tive on the sorts of practices that seem to undo the state at its territorial
and conceptual margins. The regional or local perspectives of anthro­
pology are also important here, although for somewhat different rea­
sons from those usually implied when anthropologists speak of regional
comparisons. The anthropologists in this volume all work in states
and regions that are frequendy characterized in comparative political
theory as “new nations” with “failed,” “weak,” or “partial” states, and
their work speaks in many ways to the particular modalities of rule
in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia Yet, their ethnographies of
.1
disciplinary, regulatory, and enforcement practices are framed, not as
studies of regional or failed states, but rather as invitations to rethink
the boundaries between center and periphery, public and private, legal
and illegal, that also run through the heart of even the most “success­
ful” European liberal state. An anthropology of the margins offers a
unique perspective to the understanding of the state, not because it
captures exotic practices, but because it suggests that such margins are
a necessary entailment of the state, much as the exception is a neces­
sary component of the rule.
For reasons having to do with its historical origins as the study of
“primitive” peoples, anthropology has traditionally not acknowledged
the state as a proper subject for ethnographic inspection. W ith few
exceptions, anthropology’s subject, until recently, was understood to be
primitive or “non-state” societies. Seen from this perspective, the state
seemed distant from the ethnographic practices and methods that con­
stituted the proper, disciplinary subjects of anthropology.
At the same time, however, the language and figure of the state has
haunted anthropology. W hether we choose to place the origins of polit­
4