State Formation

Anthropological Perspectives

Christian Krohn-Hansen, Knut G. Nustad

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781783715350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Constitutions
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is the 'state' and how can we best study it? This book investigates new ways of analysing the state. The contributors argue that the state is not a fixed and definite object. Our perceptions of it are constantly changing, and differ from person to person. What is your idea of the state if you are a refugee? Or if you are living in post-aparteid South Africa? Our perceptions are formed and sustained by evolving discourses and techniques -- these come from institutions such as government, but are also made by communities and individuals. The contributors examine how state structures are viewed from the inside, by official state bodies, composed of bureaucrats and politicians; and how these state manifestations are supported, reproduced or transformed at a local level. An outline of theoretical approaches is followed by nine case studies ranging from South Africa to Peru to Norway. With a good range of contributors including Cris Shore, Clifton Crais, Ana Alonso and Bruce Kapferer, this is a comprehensive critical analysis of anthropological approaches to the study of state formation.

PART I

THEORETICAL APPROACHES

1	INTRODUCTION Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad

As an object of study, the state has drifted in and out of academic focus.¹ Concern with the state as a precondition for capitalist production in the 1970s was in the 1980s replaced by a focus on forms of domination that could not be linked to a privileged place called ‘the state’ – as epitomised in Foucault’s call for cutting off the King’s head in political analyses. Much of the globalisation literature of the 1990s argued that the state was irrelevant: production, domination or resistance took place in relationships that created units either much bigger than the state, or much smaller than it. Most recently, this type of argument has been put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), who define Empire as a form of domination residing in values and ideas that claim universality. But at the same time, as Begoña Aretxaga (2003) and others have noted, the state form has not become extinct. On the contrary, the number of states has quadrupled since the Second World War, with the pace of new formations accelerating after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moreover, political activity at levels that in the 1990s were seen as undermining the importance of the state now seem to be replicating the state form. Ethnic dissidence often appears as a claim for statehood, while supranational institutions such as the European Union are mimicking the state-building processes of the European states two centuries earlier – as pointed out by Shore in this volume.

Also in the relationship between the so-called international community and poor countries, the state seems to have made a comeback. The structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s sought to protect investments by demanding a rolling back of the state – understood as public expenditure – and the creation of conditions for a free market. By contrast, the past decade has seen an increased focus on the state, with the World Bank and other institutions insisting on the importance of good governance and a rights-based approach to development – which in turn presupposes an institution that can guarantee these rights.

In all these shifts, whether the state has been treated as an important object for study or reform or as something to be minimised, the idea of the state has loomed large – either as a model for political organisation or as a negative ‘other’. Philip Abrams (1988) has pointed to a similar process in Marxist writings on the state: even those theorists who viewed the state as an assembly of practices and effects, turned it into a solid object when their writings shifted from political analyses to practice. Then, the state as a concrete reality was needed as a protagonist in the struggle. Similarly, for the neoliberal reformers of the 1980s, the state functioned as a contrast to their ideal of a civil society, of private interest and the market.

It was the problematic nature of the state that inspired the workshop ‘Explorations of the State: Considerations from Critical Anthropology’, held in Oslo in October 2002. We invited papers that dealt with anthropology and its varying relations to the state. Two sets of concerns were especially highlighted in the workshop: first, the difficulty that anthropologists and others have had in grasping the state conceptually. The idea of what constitutes a ‘state’ is not only contested: usage is also flexible, dynamic and far from uniform – hence the many adjectives applied to the state, ranging from ‘capitalist’, ‘expansionist’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘democratic’, ‘bureaucratic’, ‘socialist’, to ‘postcolonial’, ‘soft’, ‘patrimonial’, ‘collapsed’ and so forth. To be able to grasp the state analytically, we need some conceptual tidying up.

Second, there is a need for empirical studies of how state formations are effected. Many authors have argued that the core of modern state formation and expansion is that centrally made state institutions refashion the worlds inhabited and thought by members of local communities on the state’s territory. What these scholars have stressed is not so much the state’s use of physical force as its ability to impose itself by generating a cultural revolution and a moral regulation – that is, transformations that result in profound reorganisation of how social life is lived across the national space. Others, however, insist that this ‘coercive’ view of state-making bears scant relation to the complex histories – the changes in power, culture and economy – that have resulted in the genesis and construction of national control in specific parts of the world. Still other writers emphasise that agents construct states by means of tactics, negotiations and exchanges – in a word, networks.

All this underscores the need for critical, ‘grounded’ ethnography – detailed, fine-grained explorations of the social relations and symbolic imaginings that produce, reproduce and transform states in different areas of the world. It is along these two lines that we offer this collection to the reader. This volume explores how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of the field of knowledge that we call the state, and how anthropologists should set about studying the state.

WHAT IS A STATE?

Anthropology is a relative latecomer to the academic debate on the modern state, for at least two reasons. We will argue that while both these reasons help to explain the lack of focus on the state within anthropology, they also actually constitute advantages that make anthropology well equipped to study the state.

The first reason why anthropology has been slow in adopting the state as an object of study relates to the perceived nature of the state. Obviously, the state does not have an objective existence in the way that, say, a tax form has. But is it a second-order object, like a social institution such as marriage? Radcliffe-Brown answered this question with a resounding no. In the text that came to define political anthropology for many years, Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard’s African Political Systems ([1940] 1955), the state was specifically rejected as an object of study. In the introduction to that volume, Radcliffe-Brown explicitly argued against wasting time on the study of a fiction that existed solely as an ideological construct. The state, he wrote, is most often:

… represented as being an entity over and above the human individuals who make a society, having as one of its attributes something called ‘sovereignty,’ and sometimes spoken of as having a will … or as issuing commands. The State in this sense does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers. What does exist is an organization, i.e. a collection of individual human beings connected by a complex system of relations…. There is no such thing as the power of the state. (Radcliffe-Brown [1940] 1955: xxiii)

This ‘death by conceptualization’, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2001) has aptly termed it, has scarcely encouraged anthropologists to engage critically with the state.

Second, anthropology created a niche for itself in political studies by studying politics in ‘stateless societies’. In part, this was due to the ethnographic method as such: the state, as conceived and discussed by political scientists, appears as an object beyond the reach of anthropological methods.

We will argue that Radcliffe-Brown was partly right, but that he also did anthropology a tremendous disservice by writing off the state completely. He was correct in his insistence on not treating the state as a concrete object and on avoiding making a fetish of it. This point has been further elaborated by Abrams (1988). He follows Radcliffe-Brown in seeing the state as a form of mystification: the idea that the state exists as an objective entity, he argues, stems from a confusion of function with agency. But he disagrees with Radcliffe-Brown in the latter’s call for abandoning the study of the state. What does exist, according to Abrams, is an idea of the state, the ‘state’ as an ideological object that obscures and masks reality. And, he holds, the reality that is masked is the disunity of the state-system, defined as the various government institutions. These institutions – the police, the army, prisons and so forth – constitute for Abrams a loose set of ideas and practices all seeking to establish political authority and legitimacy. They are able to achieve this, he says, because they are seen not as what they really are – an assembly of uncoordinated practices and claims – but as part of a larger whole: the state. Thus, by acting in the name of the state, these institutions take on the appearance of being part of a unified whole. The function of the state idea, then, is that it lends to these institutions a degree of coherence and legitimacy that they in reality lack. Abrams thus shifts the focus away from the state as an object, to a far more diffuse field of power relations where the state becomes an ideological object that is used by the state-system to give it legitimacy.

Abrams’ intention is to focus on the effects produced as well as on who produces them. Without this latter focus, he warns, the definition of the state becomes so wide as to become meaningless. For if ‘the state’ is an idea that functions to legitimate domination, then a focus on the state as function would have to include all forms of domination. And since domination also occurs outside of the state-system, this leads, warns Abrams, to a conception of the state as immanent, everywhere and equal to society. But there is no reason to presuppose institutional fixities for the state-system; indeed, the conceptual anchoring of the idea of the state in a place is one of his main criticisms of Poulantzas. Abrams is thus very close to following Foucault’s call for cutting off the King’s head in political analyses, but instead he chooses to replace the one King with a number of smaller kings.²

If we follow Abrams’ emphasis on functions and abandon his linking of these functions to a concrete state-system, we find ourselves approaching Foucault’s notion of governmentality (1991).³ Wanting to study how modern states can reproduce themselves without being bound to a particular location, Foucault provided an answer through the concept of governmentality. In Foucault’s view, the absolutist king was limited in his power by modelling his rule on the government of the family, of the disposition of things and persons as would a head of a family. The term ‘economy’, he points out, originally meant the proper management of a family’s resources.⁴ The breakthrough came when a new entity, ‘the population’, was discovered as a separate reality with its own statistical laws, and ‘the economy’ became constructed as a separate realm of reality governed by economic laws. This made possible government through what Ian Hacking (1990) has described as the avalanche of numbers: statistics were produced about health, productivity, criminality, education, etc., which in turn enabled an unprecedented control. Foucault’s perspective on this new way of ruling, his notion of governmentality, is all that Abrams warned against: a conception of the power of the state that is everywhere: in subjects, in institutions, in the knowledge that is produced. This was an important insight even if, as we argue below, the emphasis Foucault places on knowledge in contrasting the pre-modern with the modern, or the two forms of rule, sovereign power as against disciplinary power, obscures the way in which violence still reproduces the conditions of the existence of modern states.

Trouillot has recently utilised these insights to map out a programme for the anthropological study of the state (2001). He argues that state power cannot be fixed to a particular place and that therefore, a state cannot be defined as a circumscribed institution. The state is for him a ‘set of practices and processes and their effects’, and it is these that must be studied. Therefore, focus must be shifted to state effects, regardless of where these are produced. He defines these effects as four: first, an isolation effect, ‘the production of atomized individualized subjects molded and modeled for governance as part of an undifferentiated but specific “public”’; second, an identification effect, that is ‘a realignment of the atomized subjectivities along collective lines within which individuals recognize themselves as the same’; third, a legibility effect, closely related to the knowledge described above, used to classify and regulate populations; and fourth, a spatialisation effect, the ‘production of boundaries and jurisdiction’ (2001: 126).

Thus Trouillot seeks to avoid making a fetish of the state by instead focusing on state effects. That his approach succeeds only partly becomes clear when we examine the intellectual heritage of the effects he identifies. Bob Jessop, who coined the term ‘state effects’, has examined capitalist state formation (see Jessop 1990). What he, following Poulantzas (1968), terms ‘atomization’ and ‘individuation effects’ are similar to Trouillot’s isolation and individuation effects. Jessop describes how these effects were produced historically with the formation of the capitalist state in Europe. Drawing on Marx, he argues that there was a complex relationship between the alienation of labour and the ideology of individual bourgeois rights. Capitalist state formation fragmented identities based on class and replaced them with the fiction of equal individuals who were all equal rights-bearing members of the nation. Therefore, in trying to create a universal model for the study of the modern state form, Trouillot assumes a specific form of state formation – the capitalist state as it evolved in Europe. However, there is no reason to assume a priori that a state that is differently embedded in a global history will function in the same way and produce the same effects. This must be studied empirically, and not assumed at the outset.⁵

Even Radcliffe-Brown’s dismissal of the field of state studies is very close to recent insights that the state should be studied not as an institution, but as an assembly of practices and active meaning creations. And Trouillot’s call for ethnographies of the processes that create state effects plays up to what is the main strength of anthropology: examining global processes by studying how these are manifest in everyday practices.

But there still remains a need for sharpening our analytical tools and research strategies. The next two sections argue for the importance of (1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical Approaches
• Part II A View From Communities
• Part III A View From State Bodies
• Contributors
• Index