Abstract
In this chapter, I outline a social anthropological approach to the state, called stategraphy. The term denotes an ethnographically grounded perspective that focuses on relational modalities, forms of embeddedness of actors, and boundary work as constitutive factors of the state. These avenues of analyses enable a nuanced understanding and comparative investigation of change and continuity of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in various contexts. The approach is based on a relational understanding that seeks to bridge the analytical gap between state images and state practices that developed within interdisciplinary debates on the state.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite Weber’s own interpretative approach (1978 [1920/21], his ideal type of the modern bureaucratic state took on a life of its own, which led to an understanding of the Weberian state as an actually existing entity which could be used as a yardstick for measuring the deviations of actual states (Migdal 2001, 15).
- 2.
This view relies on the mirror image of kinship/family as a minor counterpart, an idea that becomes hegemonic after the seventeenth century in which the concept of kinship was increasingly thinned out and relegated to the private as counterpart of the ‘bigger’ public, e.g. the state (Strathern 2020).
- 3.
On the Manchester school, see also Thomassen (2008).
- 4.
In the 1960s and 1970s Marxist-oriented circles, especially those engaged in the so-called Poulantzas-Miliband debate, discussed to what extent the state was exclusively an instrument of the capitalist class interest (Miliband 1983; Poulantzas 1969, 1976). In contrast, the largely American pluralist school of community studies at the time viewed the state as an extension of the power of either elitist or pluralist societal interest groups (Dahl 1961; Domhoff 1990). Finally, in the 1980s, neo-Weberian theorists sought to ‘bring the state back in’ by treating it as an autonomous entity, analytically separable from intra-societal power struggles (Evans et al. 1985). By the late 1980s, these approaches to the state had lost much of their appeal.
- 5.
His approach has the disadvantage of reifying the state by largely casting it as a stable political unit together with a state-society/citizen dichotomy.
- 6.
The collection of ethnographies of French state institutions by Fassin et al. (2015) is an exception insofar as it attempts to grasp moral economies and moral subjectivities ‘at the heart of the state’ by studying interactions between state actors and marginalized populations (Fassin 2015, 3). As such, it comes much closer to the relational approach I advocate below.
- 7.
Ethnography refers to a cluster of methodological approaches used for data collection, analysis, and processing. Usually, participant observation is deployed during one or several longer phases of field research and is combined with different types of interviews as well as collecting other resources such as archival sources, artefacts, and visual materials. This inherently reflexive approach already implies ethnography’s potential for making significant contributions to the study of social transformation because it demands a critical interrogation of the prevailing theoretical assumptions.
- 8.
On the development of network analysis in anthropology, see Schweizer 1996.
- 9.
Sedleniks (2020) describes the use of similar relational modalities by individuals and civil society actors in their negotiations with state actors around repairing a road in a Montenegrin village, showing that they are also embedded in different temporalities which make that geographically remote rural place a central state symbol.
- 10.
- 11.
For an example of the work of intermediaries that facilitate the state works in Great Britain, see Forbess and James 2018.
- 12.
Similarly, McKay (2018) traces how the overlapping of multiple relations between unequal public and non-governmental, market, and private actors shape inequalities in Mozambique.
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Thelen, T. (2022). Stategraphy: A Social Anthropological Approach to the State. In: Fahimi, M., Flatschart, E., Schaffar, W. (eds) State and Statehood in the Global South. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94000-3_3
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