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

Thomas Blom Hansen is a Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  

  

  

  

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: States of Imagination / Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat

I. State and Governance
“Democratic Societies”: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty / Mitchell Dean
Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India / Akhil Gupta
The Battlefield and the Prize: ANC’s Bid to Reform the South African State / Steffen Jensen
Imagining the State as a Space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador / Sarah A. Radcliffe

II. State and Justice
The South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation / Lars Buur
Recontructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory: The Work of the TRC / Aletta J. Norval
Rethinking Citizenship: Reforming the Law in Postwar Guatemala / Rachel Sieder
Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai / Thomas Blom Hansen

III. State and Community
Before History and Prior to Politics: Time, Space, and Territory in the Modern Peruvian Nation-State / David Nugent
Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala / Finn Stepputat
In the Name of the State? Schools and Teachers in an Andean Province / Fiona Wilson
The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan / Oskar Verkaaik
Public Secrets, Conscious Amnesia, and the Celebration of Autonomy for Ladakh / Martijn van Beek

Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index