Everyday States: The Anthropology of Power and Politics

1 Course Unit

While anthropologists have long been interested in political systems, they have in recent years made the modern state a critical site of ethnographic analysis. By focusing on everyday practice of officials in the Global North and South, anthropologists have drawn attention to the creative ways in which state actors and subjects of rule make and maintain its powerful institutions. Even as bureaucracies are formalized and instituted as sites of rational order and even-handed administration, scholars of everyday state formation have drawn attention to the ways that state authority depends on and reproduces racialized, gendered and geopolitical inequality. Indeed, like many other social institutions, racialized states are constituted through differentiated relations between government workers and the governed, through everyday rituals of violence and sovereignty, discipline and improvement. The class begins with a review of some influential theorizations of the modern state. Next, we focus on how political authority and social difference are produced by the everyday work of states. We attend to the colonial, racialized and gendered workings of states- particularly through their efforts to discipline black and brown bodies through sovereign violence and differentiated plans and programs of development. Finally, we will conclude the class by attending to the political work of subordinated groups as they demand distributive justice, equity and full citizenship in 'most of the world.' Spring, odd numbered years only 1 Course Unit