State: Anthropological Aspects
John Borneman, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Modern statehood is a mode of political organization of ‘society’ in which the state is the primary agent charged with building
its representation. The nation has become the preferred form for this representation, law, the principal means used to
anticipate the conduct of its subjects (citizens) and develop normative frameworks (policies) to direct change, and
democracy, the dominant form of self-representation. The scope of the state now goes beyond traditional activities such as
war and the production of laws that regulate the exercise of power over territoriality and commerce to extend to the
generation of forms of subjectivity in people.
Modern statehood is a mode of political organization of
‘society’ in which the state is the primary agent charged with
building the representation of society aware of itself and in
harmony with itself. Nation-states have become the preferred
mode by which all of the earth’s polities organize people and
territory into formally comparable and sovereign governing
units. The scope of the state now goes beyond traditional
activities such as war and the production of laws that regulate
the exercise of power over territoriality and commerce; it also
generates new forms of subjectivity in people. Anthropologists
initially observed this expansion of the state by studying the
elimination, transformation, or preservation of indigenous
peoples, tribes, peasants, clans, and kinship systems through
the creation of encompassing, though also exclusionary,
national forms of belonging. One major state activity that
anthropologists have identified has been the deployment of
ethnographic modes of defining and categorizing human
populations and of systematizing knowledge about them,
especially in colonial states. Hence, the science of anthropology
has followed closely and defined its objects in terms of state
projects, alternately supportive and oppositional: itemizing
culture traits and social organizations of discrete peoples,
tracing efforts at internal and external colonization, mapping
the settling and resettling of territory, and tracking diasporic
populations and global trade routes.
The ‘state’ refers to a form of polity that links people and
territory in ‘societies’ and thereby demarcates itself from other
states. Although archaeologists date states back to ancient Egypt
and Mesopotamia (about 2500 BC), this article deals only with
the anthropological aspects of the modern state. It examines
the implications of linking people to territory on subject
formation; the administration of populations and their
cultures; and on the practices of religiosity, kinship, and
commerce, as well as on anthropology itself.
The Concept of Modern Statehood
Modern statehood is a mode of political organization of society
in which the state is the primary agent charged with building
the representation of society aware of itself and in harmony
with itself. Today, the nation is the preferred form this repre-
sentation assumes. It is always an idealization and always in
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 23
tension with the actual forms of group organization and their
heterogeneous, agonistic compositions. Modern law is the
principal means by which the state attempts to create this
harmony, an ideal state in which there is a coincidence between
behavior and rules and where the state can anticipate the
conduct of its subjects (citizens) and develop normative
frameworks (policies) to direct change (Nader, 1990).
States are only one of many rule-making institutions with
administrative capacities. International and supranational
bodies also increasingly make law. And while states largely
retain for themselves the power of legitimate enforcement,
corporations, religions, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), and other non-state actors are equally organized and
rely on other sources of power to circumvent or control state
law. In most parts of the contemporary world, however, states
remain the institution with the most effective ideological and
institutional apparatus, also recognized by other states, to
claim to represent the entire people within a particular terri-
torial jurisdiction.
Statehood became the central principle asserted in inter-
national law in 1648, with the signing of the Treaty of West-
phalia ending the 30 years of war in North–Central Europe.
Driven by industrial capitalism as a superior mode of
production and accumulation, the state expanded its functions
beyond the conduct of war, the administration of justice, and
the regulation of commerce, to massive projects in the colo-
nization of populations in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the
mid-East (Dirks, 1993; Stoler, 1995). Western European states,
in particular, formulated projects of external and internal
colonization, and they began to usurp religious authority’s
control over the definitions of transcendence, the bodies of
their subjects, and the institutionalization of their life courses.
Initially employed as a political program in the French
Revolution and subsequently written into the United Nations
Charter, the nation form grew out of transformed empires and
tribes during the process of European state formation (Tilly,
1990). It also dissolved a feudal model of society by means
of cultivation of behaviors based in part on class emulation
and conflict (Elias, 1982). At the same time, in a process of
reciprocal copying, states in the Americas also emulated
the nation form. This transformation of diverse peoples
into unified nations appropriated local discourses of
consanguinity and affinity and, in turn, was propped onto
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12150-6 347
348 State: Anthropological Aspects
and often reconstructed local kinship. Unification of nations
was rarely accomplished without intermittent purges or other
kinds of homogenizing processes. From the late fifteenth
century to the early seventeenth century, all Western
European states engaged, with often-disastrous economic
consequences, in variant forms of ethnoreligious ‘cleansing,’
leading to population resettlement and the formation of victim
groups.
In the twentieth century, national consolidations and the
creation of new types of victim groups reached new heights,
especially with the advent of fascist and racist ideologies orig-
inating in Europe and also employed elsewhere (Lefort, 1986).
The peace treaties concluding World War I introduced into
Eastern and Southern Europe the two conditions of West
European nation-states – homogeneity of population and
rootedness in the soil. In Eastern Europe, the implementation
of these principles was largely elided during the Cold War, with
the establishment of socialist states based on universal broth-
erhood and allied with the Soviet Union – a bloc that dissolved
following the so-called velvet revolutions of 1989. Western
European states emerged weakened from World War II and
were unable to resist independence movements in their colo-
nized states, primarily in Africa and Asia. These postcolonial
states in turn nearly universally adopted the nation form to
integrate diverse groups within territorial boundaries already
drawn, arbitrarily, by European states. Nation-states have since
become the mode by which all of the earth’s polities are
organized into formally comparable and sovereign governing
units. Appropriation of the nation form effectively broadened
the scope of the state to include the planned change of culture,
variously defined, and the generation of forms of subjectivity in
populations (Borneman, 1992).
Subject Formation through Linking Territory
to People
The 1933 Montevideo Convention defined the criteria for
statehood as having (1) a permanent population, (2) a defined
territory, (3) government, and (4) the capacity to enter into
relations with other states (Article 1, League of Nations Treaty
Series No. 881) – with only the first two criteria consistently
upheld. Between 1945 and 2011, the number of states recog-
nized by international law as sovereign members of the United
Nations increased from 51 to 193, with two nonmember states
(the Holy See and Switzerland) and a few countries with
sovereignty disputes. Defining statehood this way has
numerous effects on subject formation. First, it produces
pressures to unify ethnically mixed and territorially dispersed
populations by centralizing legal and education systems and
standardizing the life course. States uniformize by means of
both bureaucratic technologies (the use of, e.g., interviews,
surveys, and maps) and psychological appeals to the ‘shared’
symbolic universes they create (through the standardization of
grammars and linguistic use, and the shaping of experience in
ritual events and everyday routines). Second, it creates pop-
ulations with mixed loyalties, settlers, or migrants who live in
a place among peoples separate from the place and peoples
with whom they primarily identify. Third, it generates cate-
gories of automatic exclusion (e.g., resident stateless peoples,
resident internal ‘minorities,’ nonresident external others),
which are then used frequently to justify war against external or
internal enemies. Fourth, the dependence of modern political
representation on territorial attachment reinforces identifica-
tions with territory and the desire for statehood. These identi-
fications exacerbate territorial conflicts and often lead to wars
between potential antagonists who tend to receive interna-
tional recognition only when their disagreements are articu-
lated in terms of border violations.
Despite the ubiquity of the nation-state, different historical
experiences of populations have produced a variety of ways of
classifying states, some corresponding to intent of the ruler,
others to the relation of ruler to ruled, and still others to their
cultural form. The twentieth-century conflict between ‘socialist
states’ and ‘liberal democracies’ uniformized neither the state
form nor the experience of citizenship, as local cultures had
enduring influences on actual political forms and relations.
Other factors, such as relations with colonial powers or
unfriendly neighbors, independence or separatist movements,
or dependent economic relations also strongly influenced
national cohesion and state functioning, leading to increasing
awareness that what some analysts label ‘failed states.’ In
accounting for this variety of state forms and the historical
conditions of their production, anthropologists have focused on
the organization of public authority and forms of domestic
control. The historian Foucault (1977, 1978) and the political
scientist Anderson (1983) have inspired much recent
scholarship.
The powers unleashed by science since the Enlightenment
have generated what Foucault calls ‘rituals of truth,’ including
disciplinary technologies that refigure space and the arts of
governance charged with producing society and ‘culture’ as
objects of knowledge and identification. Moreover, the deploy-
ment of new procedures of power in the nineteenth century
transformed state authority from a sovereign’s ability to ‘take life
or let live’ (to order or require someone’s death) to an invest-
ment in administering life by means of disciplining the body
and regulating populations. States, Foucault argues, institu-
tionalize particular cultural forms through projects of reform,
education, development, incarceration, war, welfare, and family
planning, along with the use of scientific techniques such as
surveys, census, questionnaires, actuarial tables, economic fore-
casting, spatial mapping, case studies, and bureaucratic inter-
views. Anderson focuses on the historical conditions in which
the ‘imagined community’ of the nation comes into being and
achieves global currency, particularly in its relation to states
following the collapse of empires. One of these conditions, print
capitalism, enables advances in techniques of memory and
collective narration through the proliferation of historicist myths
and standardized accounts of experiences of national belonging
across space and irrespective of local temporalities.
Because modern governing necessitates delineating a pop-
ulation and a territory, rulers invariably deploy ethnographic
assumptions about how to define a people. As well, through
laws and policies, states produce and circulate information
about belonging (through families, schools, and the media);
positively and negatively sanction prescriptive and proscriptive
behaviors (about sexuality, gender, age, race, ethnicity, and
work); and build libraries, monuments, and museums to
display particular interpretations of the nation. In sum, modern

states are distinctive in that they produce both laws and people;
they not only administer and regulate already existing cultural
patterns but also produce new domains of objects and forms of
subjectivity.
The Discipline of Anthropology and the State
Early anthropological work on the state, especially among
archaeologists, was inspired above all by Friedrich Engels’s
study of the origin of the state and its relation to private
property, Lewis Henry Morgan’s evolutionary scheme, and Sir
Henry Maine’s theory of the progressive movement from
status to contract in the development of state law (Service,
1975). Fieldwork-based anthropologists, inspired by
Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, did not initially
theorize the state or the nation, although their research was
most frequently among indigenous peoples, tribes, peasants,
and clans who were either in conflictual relations with
states or involved in a process elimination, accommodation,
transformation, or preservation in response to state
challenges to their territory and resources.
The discipline of anthropology has closely followed and
defined its objects in dialogue with state projects, alternately
supportive and oppositional: itemizing culture traits and
social organizations of ‘discrete’ peoples; devising evolu-
tionary schemes; tracing efforts at internal and external colo-
nization; mapping the settling and resettling of territory and
the transformation of property; and tracking diasporic pop-
ulations, cultural diffusion, and global trade routes (Moore,
1986). One major state activity that anthropologists have
identified has been the deployment of ethnographic modes
of defining and categorizing human populations and of
systematizing knowledge about them, especially in colonial
states (Cohen, 1996; Ferguson, 1990; Pemberton, 1994;
Scott, 1998).
By and large, however, anthropological questions have
revolved around the production of the cultural or social orga-
nization or forms of exchange among people considered
marginal or obstacles to state projects (Sahlins, 1981).
Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, a preference
for fieldwork in villages or small-scale commu-
nities not fully integrated into states or supranational
exchanges also made states less of a focus to the subjects of
anthropological research. Further, long-term observational
fieldwork among ordinary people often requires a kind of
intimate access that precludes relations with rulers or those in
the inner circles of power. Anthropologists in this period,
therefore, assumed an essential sociocultural opposition of the
people to the state (Clastres, 1987). This claim seemed
credible, if not ethically imperative, when, as in the early
twentieth century, the objects of study were so-called
primitives and indigenous peoples, victimized and threatened
with extinction, frequently through state-supported genocide,
or, alternatively, when the state was primarily a puppet of
a colonial power. Nonetheless, the opposition is misleading,
as groups victimized by the state nonetheless must, and
increasingly do, appeal to states for protections and remedies.
Also, the state often provides the most powerful modality for
representation of group interests.
State: Anthropological Aspects 349
Anthropology has in the meantime become a global disci-
pline of alterity, no longer restricted to questions of origin or to
particular kinds of peoples or places. Also, the relation of
indigenous people to states has changed considerably, with
some states now even guaranteeing the ‘preservation of indige-
nous cultures’ and prioritizing ‘native’ rights over those of more
recent settlers. Moreover, the United Nations along with some
NGOs and a global tourist industry positively sanction states
that protect and support what are called ‘first peoples’ –
a movement that has reversed the trend toward extinction and
strengthened the importance of claiming cultural authenticity
or temporal priority of settlement.
In any case, the notion of ‘kin-based’ or ‘acephalic’ polities as
a pre-evolutionary stage to a ‘state-based’ polity, or of the
replacement of status by contract, has become a moot for
ethnographic research as the entire planet is organized
territorially by states mutually regulated through legal
contracts and unevenly integrated by global market exchanges
(Moore, 1978). Anthropologists, instead, now investigate the
simultaneity of the organization of kinship and the state, of
various stages of developmental narratives, and of status and
contract. The interaction of people with states may be an
unavoidable condition of modern life, but it is by no means
unambiguous in outcomes or in the trajectory of change.
This interaction took three meta-narrative forms in the
second half of the twentieth century: people living within the
bipolar Cold War structure of socialist or communist states
(planned economies, single-party rule, so-called Second
World of totalitarian states) vs liberal states (free market
economies, multiparty democracies, so-called First World)
and a contested zone of people living in postcolonial states
(mixed economies with diverse political forms liberated from
empires, so-called Third World). Until the late 1970s,
anthropologists had difficulty obtaining access to people
within the totalitarian states, and in other parts of the world
they devoted considerable research to reconstructing the
precolonial state.
In the mid-1970s, a global trend toward democratization of
authoritarian states began in Southern Europe; was advanced in
Latin America and parts of Asia in the 1980s; and spread to sub-
Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union in the late
1980s and 1990s, making the relation of these peoples to
transforming states a subject of anthropological research
(Coronil, 1997; Verdery, 1996). In 2011, the same process of
challenge and destabilization of authoritarian regimes began
among Arab-speaking populations in the Middle East. In
effect, the space of the Second World has disappeared and the
spaces of the Third and First Worlds are mixed, existing within
each other, though in radically uneven proportions.
Beginning in the 1980s, the liberal democracies engaged in
market reforms – dubbed ‘neoliberalism’ – that deregulated the
finance sectors as well as many kinds of trade relations and
corporate activity, and opened internal economic and cultural
relations to global markets (Greenhouse, 2010). The ideology
that markets and the private sector are more efficient than
states and the public sector received a large bonus by the
collapse of the socialist states of East–Central Europe and the
disintegration of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War
divide into East and West blocs accelerated these global
exchanges across territories and on a larger scale than
350 State: Anthropological Aspects
previously possible, suggesting not only a need for states to
regulate them but also demonstrating the limits of national
law and the inadequacies of existing regulatory agencies to do
so. In response to these newly extended and often global
markets, the national subject, known as ‘citizen,’ was
increasingly reduced to the identity of a consumer, which has
changed the imagination of the individual’s relation to the
social (Dunn, 2004).
Of note at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the
distinctive tensions created by the global integration of
financial markets, the loss of state sovereignty over national
economies, the proliferation of ethnic affirmation within
states, and the denationalization (privatization and
outsourcing) of much military conflict. State accommodation
to globalization often compromises national sovereignty,
although this varies greatly depending on the state’s size,
wealth, location in the international system, and its domestic
legitimacy. States are under increasing global pressures to
refrain from protecting local cultural forms, which, even if
unable to maintain some autonomy in the face of
globalization, are nonetheless not uniformized by global
markets, a fact apparent both in the local variations in
‘society’s’ relation to the state, specifically to democratic form,
and to the continued patterned diversity of cultures, expressed
in everyday routines and rituals. At the same time, however,
one of the effects of these tensions is a dramatic rise in
inequality within groups and the pauperization of large parts
of populations in all parts of the world.
The vast majority of states now call themselves democracies
and, therefore, operate in a specific mode of ruling and employ
specific devices of power and strategies of self-representation. As
a mode of ruling, this entails the introduction of regularized
elections; the creation of ruling majorities and minorities; the
institutionalization of an opposition; and the strengthening of
principles of accountability that circumscribe the exercise of
power, usually embodied in principles of ‘the rule of law’
(Borneman, 1997). As a device of power, however, some of
these same democratic modes of ruling, such as majority rule,
lend themselves to degeneration into forms of despotism. A
state is often as dependent on the externalization of negative
others as on facilitating an internal dynamics of citizen
formation. Practices of such externalization range from state-
tolerated social discrimination to legal exclusion of refugees to
war against neighbors. As a strategy of self-representation,
each democracy requires not only internal assent but
international recognition too, which it obtains only to the
extent it is able to claim governance by ‘rule of the people’
and conformity to international norms and conventions.
When states violate such norms and conventions, which they
frequently do, they risk censure, sanctions, or other forms of
international pressure. Such pressure often strengthens the
hand of local groups against the state.
Anthropologists engaged in research requiring listening to
others are often asked to advocate in the international arena
for the people studied and thus engage with all three registers
of democracy. Their research often takes positions on local
political struggles. As experts on culture, anthropologists are
frequently asked to use legal disputes knowledge obtained in
fieldwork that is critical of state modes of rule or strategies
self-representation (Good, 2007). Given the increasingly
global nature of ‘news’ and accelerated information flows
across state borders, local struggles about representation
quickly enter international or supranational arenas,
subjecting the state to pressure from authorities external to it
and explicitly drawing attention to the ways in which it
exercises sovereignty. Such global flows also challenge state
sovereignty by bringing to the world’s attention local and
subregional actors and events that might be in opposition to
dominant groups within a state.
The study of conflicts in democratizing states includes
research on social and legal citizenship and on the relation of
state policy to demands for representation and accountability.
Along these lines, four basic contemporary conflicts about
representation and states are observable: involving excluded
people who want more social, economic, cultural, or legal
inclusion into states in which they reside; diasporic people who
want representation in both the place in which they reside and
the place from which they are displaced; numerical minorities
(usually represented as a culture or a ‘nation’) who do not have
their own state but want one; and citizens or social movements
that demand more and various kinds of accountability from
their rulers.
Legitimacy and the Modern State
Although the conception and functions of the modern state
keep changing, a state’s legitimacy is always based both on
some notion of the ‘consent’ of its own citizens to rule and on
the recognition of other states. This was not the case when rule
was justified without recourse to ‘the people,’ in other words,
rule based on coercion alone, on principles of heredity or
wealth, the ability to wage war and collect taxes, or the
administration of justice. To obtain this consent and recog-
nition, the state must usually go beyond Max Weber’s famous
dictum that its power rests on a monopoly on the legitimate
use of violence.
In many parts of the world, the state no longer even
pretends, in fact, to hold this monopoly on violence. In the last
30 years, most states have tended to outsource and privatize
many security functions. Where the state has privatized or even
dissolved its former functions, the most vulnerable citizens
tend to suffer the most from the lack of any protections.
Indeed, today weak or ‘failed’ states are just as likely to lead
to violent conflict as were strong imperial states in the
last several centuries. In many places, the state’s own abuse
of this supposed monopoly – through genocide, strategic
terrorism, the suppression of dissent, cynical uses of war –
has traumatic effects on its citizens, leading to repeated and
delayed suffering of past events. Increasingly, then, the
anthropology of the state focuses on privatization,
security, outsourcing, violence, vulnerability, and trauma
(Masco, 2006).
Irrespective of whether they initiate or are victims of
violence, states instrumentalize traumatic events, not only by
building monuments to fallen heroes or soldiers but also
through the construction of nationalist historiographies and
support for a heritage industry that especially honors the idea
of national sacrifice and organizes the process of mourning for
losses after large-scale violence (Borneman, 2011). So long as

the state continues to draw legitimacy from principles of
territorial sovereignty and peoplehood, it will be motivated
to generate, exacerbate, and institutionalize differences
with neighbors or neighboring states. Anthropologists are
most focused on the effects of these conflicts and wars
on the organization of populations and communities
(Tambiah, 1992).
Also, the collapse of the Cold War’s bipolar state system has
resulted in the relatively unrestricted proliferation of arms, much
of it driven by state-supported arms industries, and in a market
for new and affordable technologies of death outside the control
of states. Where the sources and agents of violence outside state
control are increasing – a wide-ranging phenomena found, for
example, in Colombia due to drug trafficking, in Sri Lanka
and much of Africa due to civil war, and in the United States
or Mexico due to poverty and class conflict – people employ
private police forces and militias. States are also located
ambiguously to many occasions of collective violence, such as
genocide, at times instigating, at other times complicitous with
local groups, and at others offering remedies (Ghassem-
Fachandi, 2012).
Alternatively, many states now lend their militaries for
‘peace-keeping’ efforts in other countries organized by the
United Nations, and still others, such as states within the
European Union, are relinquishing military sovereignty to
continental or transcontinental military alliances. There is
also a growing body of legal doctrine – and an International
Criminal Court established in 1999 in the Hague – that
attempts to hold states accountable to their own norms and
to international covenants and agreements on issues such as
human rights, environmental and maritime law, and
commercial law. The state’s sovereignty and legitimacy,
then, is not granted as natural but conferred by its citizens
and by the recognition of other states and new international
regimes.
Anthropologists now supplement the long history of linking
the state to realization of the Idea of the people (Hegel), repre-
sentation of the social (Durkheim), technical and bureaucratic
rationality (Weber), or exploitation and class dominance
(Marx), with an acknowledgment that most states still resort to
magical practices and cultivate religiosity in order to legitimate
rule (Taussig, 1997). State policies and edicts administered
through ‘law’ often work through processes similar to magic:
belief in the power of the utterance of the speaker, the
performativity of speech, the linguistic rearticulation of group
suffering and instrumentalization of memory, nationalistic
narrativization of macro-political events, and ad hoc
rationalization of failures and successes. Even in the domain
of criminal law in what are considered the most rational of
states – Germany or Sweden, for example – most crimes are
never solved and most criminals go free. Yet, criminal law
there still ‘works’ – that is, contributes to the legitimation of
the state – largely through belief in the principles of justice
that judicial inquiries, prosecutions, and trials efficaciously
represent.
Likewise with respect to religion, states most successful in
establishing a secular authority over local or world religions are
those that recognize the significance of religiosity and incorpo-
rate religious traditions and symbolic forms into the secular
rituals of political parties, elections, bureaucratic routines, and
State: Anthropological Aspects 351
life course rites de passage (Gauchet, 1997; Herzfeld, 1992). Such
practices are forms of group worship and they crystallize in
patterns of national belonging when citizen and state
narratives are brought into harmony. The struggle between the
great world religions and the state to occupy and shape the
symbolic forms of everyday life has not quieted, however.
Secular narratives organizing life and death have proven
incapable of replacing the power of myth and religious
authority in accounting for the inexplicable or creating
experiences of transcendence. Nonetheless, there has been
a dispersion of the power over the control of religious
expression, with religions also constantly subject to internal
reform movements and no longer holding monopolies over
local populations, and the state is one of many benefactors
from this process.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century in most places
of what is known as the First World, entertainment –
especially involving sport and music – has emerged as
the field dominating both the management of experiences
of transcendence and of people’s affective attachments
and identifications. State rituals – especially electoral
campaigns, legislative debates, memorialization and mourning
ceremonies, and political speeches – have, therefore,
increasingly incorporated models and techniques of authority
drawn from entertainment. This leads to a fusion of actors
(‘personalities’) in the two fields and an incorporation of magic
and infusion of ‘charisma’ in the rationalized arena of state
activity.
With the end of the Cold War, First World states increasingly
structured their relations to new and Third World states by
promoting NGOs. Acting in a negative symbiosis with the state,
such NGOs also incorporate magic into their missionary projects
of rational reform and economic and political development. In
much of the world, they have become strong competitors to
organized religion and to the state in providing care (welfare), in
development projects, and promoting both local and global
accountability in the exercise of power. Often, however, they
serve primarily as instruments for the transfer of wealth or power
between supranational elites.
Notwithstanding liberal mistrust of the modern state, reaf-
firmed by the horrors of totalitarian experiments, the nation-
state form still provides the possibility for local control of
people’s own destinies in a manner impossible for
prenational communities. Stateless people are indeed the
most defenseless actors in the contemporary world. Hence,
despite the wars, violent revolutions, and massive repressions
of the nation-state, as the sociologist Lepsius (1988) argues,
this form of polity has offered particular advantages to West
European societies, including the institutionalization of
peaceful conflict-solving through the rule of law, guarantees
of individual freedom, the organization of interests through
parliamentary democracies, and the integration of national
economic development in the world economy. In each of
these measures, authoritarian and totalitarian states elsewhere
have been at a permanent disadvantage, incapable of
recognizing the subjects they seek to control for whom they
are and unable to organize power, except through coercion.
Such states destroy sociality and build false representations of
the people, thereby creating a basis for the illusion of society
against state.
352 State: Anthropological Aspects
See also: Citizenship: Political; Governmentality; Kinship in
Anthropology; Law: Anthropological Aspects; Nationalism:
General; Political Anthropology; Postcoloniality; Socialist
Societies: Anthropological Aspects; State Formation, Theory of;
State, History of; State, Sociology of The; States and
Civilizations, Archaeology of; War: Anthropological Aspects,
Historical Development of.
Bibliography
Anderson, B.R.O’.G., 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. Verso, London.
Borneman, J., 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Borneman, J., 1997. Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Post-
socialist States. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Borneman, J., 2011. Political Crime and the Memory of Loss. Indiana University Press,
Bloomington.
Clastres, P., 1987. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Zone
Books, New York.
Cohen, B., 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Coronil, F., 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Dirks, N.B., 1993. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
Dunn, E., 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of
Labor. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Elias, N., 1982. State Formation and Civilization. Basil Blackwell Ltd, London.
Ferguson, J., 1990. The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Foucault, M., 1977. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.).
Vintage, New York.
Foucault, M., 1978. The History of Sexuality (R. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin, London.
Gauchet, M., 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: a Political History of Religion
(O. Burge, Trans.). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Geertz, C., 1980. Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Ghassem-Fachandi, P., 2012. Pogrom in Gujarat. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Good, A., 2007. Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts. Routledge-Cavendish,
London.
Greenhouse, C. (Ed.), 2010. Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia.
Herzfeld, M., 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: the Symbolic Roots of Western
Bureaucracy. Berg, New York.
Lefort, C., 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy,
Totalitarianism. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lepsius, M.R., 1988. Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen. Westdeutscher Verlag,
Opladen.
Masco, J., 2006. Nuclear Borderlands: the Manhattan Project in Post-cold War New
Mexico. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Moore, S.F., 1978. Law as Process: an Anthropological Approach. Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Moore, S.F., 1986. Social Facts and Fabrications: ‘Customary Law’ on Kilimanjaro,
1880–1980. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Nader, L., 1990. Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village.
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Pemberton, J., 1994. On the Subject of Java. Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY.
Sahlins, M.D., 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the
Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, MI.
Scott, J., 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, Ct.
Service, E.R., 1975. Origins of the State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural
Evolution. Norton, New York.
Stoler, A.L., 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and
the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Tambiah, S.J., 1992. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Taussig, M., 1997. The Magic of the State. Routledge, New York.
Tilly, C., 1990. Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–1990. Blackwell,
Oxford, MA.
Verdery, K., 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ.