State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives

279 Pages·2005·1.63 MB·English

by  Christian Krohn-Hansen

STATE FORMATION
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by
CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN
and KNUT G. NUSTAD
Foreword by
BRUCE KAPFERER
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree iiiiii 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2288
First published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad 2005
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2442 8 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2441 X paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
State formation: anthropological perspectives / edited by Christian Krohn-Hansen
and Knut G. Nustad.
p. cm. –– (Anthropology, culture, and society)
Chiefly papers presented at a workshop held at the University of Oslo in
Oct. 2002.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0 7453 2442 8 (hardback) ISBN 0 7453 2441 X (paperback)
1. Political anthropology. 2. State, The. 3. Politics and culture. I. Krohn-Hansen,
Christian, 1957– II. Nustad, Knut G., 1968– III. Series.
GN492.S83 2002
306.2––dc22
2005006706
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree iivv 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2288
CONTENTS
Foreword vii
Bruce Kapferer
Preface xii
PART I THEORETICAL APPROACHES
1. Introduction 3
Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad
2. Sovereignty, the Spatial Politics of Security, and Gender:
Looking North and South from the US–Mexico Border 27
Ana M. Alonso
PART II A VIEW FROM COMMUNITIES
3. Chiefs and Bureaucrats in the Making of Empire: A Drama
from the Transkei, South Africa, October 1880 55
Clifton Crais
4. State Formation through Development in Post-apartheid
South Africa 79
Knut G. Nustad
5. Negotiated Dictatorship: The Building of the Trujillo State
in the Southwestern Dominican Republic 96
Christian Krohn-Hansen
6. The Materiality of State-Effects: An Ethnography of a Road
in the Peruvian Andes 123
Penelope Harvey
7. Contradictory Notions of the State: Returned Refugees in
Guatemala 142
Kristi Anne Stølen
v
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree vv 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2288
vi State Formation
PART III A VIEW FROM STATE BODIES
8. Counting on State Subjects: State Formation and Citizenship in
Twentieth-century Mexico 171
Helga Baitenmann
9. ‘A Speech that the Entire Ministry May Stand For’:
On Generating State Voice 195
Iver B. Neumann
10. ‘Better Safe than Sorry’: Legislating Assisted Conception
in Norway 212
Marit Melhuus
11. The State of the State in Europe, or, ‘What is the European
Union that Anthropologists Should be Mindful of It?’ 234
Cris Shore
Contributors 256
Index 257
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree vvii 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299
FOREWORD
Bruce Kapferer
The question of the state has always been at the centre of political and
philosophical debate but interest has intensified of late across the social
sciences. This has much to do with attacks on modernism, the state being
seen as the arch-culprit in the human crises, destructions and disasters that
have befallen humankind throughout its history, and most of all in the more
recent centuries. Political and economic developments – the fall of the Soviet
Union, 9/11 and a new US militarism, the European Union and its reaction to
the Treaty of Westphalia, contemporary globalisation, the further growth of
corporate power, the Internet – have dramatically affected the nature of state
power. How this is so is a major problem to be examined, as are the human
and social consequences that follow from the redrawing of the nature of state
orders and power. The importance of such inquiry cannot be overstressed.
The state, at least the imagination of the state (the real or fantasised effect of
the state on human existence) has likely been of major influence on the lives
of human beings from the very beginnings of human history, even for those
peoples who refused state forms of control and order. It has been integral
within human subjectivity and part of the dynamics vital in the creation
of human relations (even in contexts of the rejection of any kind of state
control, as Clastres once discussed). In some approaches (particularly since
the rise of modern nationalism) the state has frequently been conceived as
virtually synonymous with the imaginary of society. I am suggesting that
an understanding of the state is crucial to an exploration of human being,
for the social sciences especially, and that it is receiving a renewed focus of
interest is appropriate to its centrality. This is especially so in the current
situation of what today appears to many commentators and scholars alike
as major changes of an almost cosmological and ontological quality that are
taking place in contemporary state orders and the surrounding political and
social fields of their operation.
Of course I am talking about the state in an over-general and in a far too
uniform way. The state has taken widely diverse forms throughout history
and the kind of state, or modern or contemporary state, that the essays in
this volume address is a recent invention, although still highly diverse in its
shaping. Within that sphere too easily glossed as the West, what is discussed
as the state has taken quite different forms. The highly centralised forms
vii
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree vviiii 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299
viii State Formation
that grew up in Europe and frequently among its colonised outer regions
are, perhaps, to be distinguished from the US form, as De Tocqueville posited.
While many might contest this, I think a strong argument could be made that
the currently globally dominant US form that is certainly effecting changes
in state formations throughout the world has dimensions in its imaginary
and in its practice quite distinct from its neighbours across the Atlantic.
This was a powerful imaginative intent of its founders and in numerous
aspects it was already postmodern. I suggest that the experience of the state
and the way the state is subjectivised in the US are often very different from
the experience and subjectivisation of the state in many other parts of the
world. Such an observation is relevant to many current discussions of the
state, which tend to conceive of it from within a dominant North American
postmodern perspective and which, not infrequently, even if subconsciously,
becomes an ideal standard against which others are measured.
But all the above does not get us very close to an understanding as to what
exactly we understand by the state or the often very different formations that
we might describe as involving state processes. This is one of the important
contributions of the essays in this volume. Here there is a concern with the
practices through which the state materially makes its appearance, whether
this be through the technological construction of lines of communication
(and control), the bureaucratic inscription of subjects, the presentation of
official policy, the production of refugees, etc. There is a stress on the state in
its diverse and differentiated aspects, a treatment of the state in its complexi-
ties of institutional manifestation, practices and experiencing rather than, as
is too common, as a singular, all-embracing, totalising idea. Here there is an
important shift away from the state as a transcendent imagined ideality of
a Hegelian kind, which may be too disjunct from the concrete in which the
state is materially realised and comes to have its embodied effects.
Recent approaches to the state have seized on the fact that it is an imagined
reality, a point that is already central in Hegelian perspectives. But the very
reality of the state is in the very character of its imaginary (as a spectre in
human consciousness that has, as such, an effect on human action). Such an
imaginary of the state is also a materiality, a force (spirit) in the constitution
of persons and in the manifold arrangements and their processes of human
existence. Perhaps it is of the same order as other constructed totalities such
as ‘society’ or ‘community’ in the social sciences. These, for example, focus
on those dimensions affecting individual action, such as identity and the
institutional and relational. Notions like the state, society and community
have the character of Deleuzian virtuals (yet thoroughly real) in their abstract
totalisation but are simultaneously actually evident, indeed empirically
evident, in the diversity of particular human practices. The state is an idea
– and, as the chapters in this book indicate, an idea with numerous different
histories and conceptualisations. It is not to be reduced to power (although
this is the key feature of the state upon which the idea concentrates), nor to
particular organisations of government or of rule (although these are the
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree vviiiiii 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299
Foreword ix
commanding centres and most material manifestations of the state). The state
is these things and more, a general and diverse forming of power, authority
and control, the critical force defining the political, that has sovereign claim
(or is yielded such claim) to constitute the conditions of existence of those
brought within its realm.
The reality of the state is to be grasped ethnographically both in its
imaginary and in the concreteness of practices that have a state relation or
reference. This forms the major contribution of the essays in this book. The
contribution is all the more because of the focus on contemporary states,
the modern state. As the editors stress, much ethnography, especially in
anthropology, has until recently been focused on archaic forms, usually small
in scale and concentrating on central institutions such as kings and chiefs. A
strong evolutionism is present in such approaches. Many of the ethnographic
studies of non-Western state systems carried the implication that they were
preliminary and lower forms of modern state forms in Europe and North
America. This sense is continuing and is evident in current accounts of
so-called ‘failed’ states and their humanity-destroying excess. These do not
so much critique the idea of the modern state as indicate that failed states,
in Africa, for example, are merely underdeveloped possibilities of the state.
Modernisation perspectives continue into postmodern conceptions of state
practice, often masquerading as anti-state arguments: for instance, many of
the critiques of state practice from within the situation of North America that
culturally or ideologically display many of the tenets of US exceptionalism.
The ethnographies presented here explore practices that reveal the distinc-
tiveness of certain modern state formations but also the similarities that may
extend across apparent difference. Dictatorships are distinct from democratic
states, yet the former no less than the latter operate a dialectics of consent
that is both socially constitutive and reproductive of state power. As recent
events have dramatically shown, the removal of dictators or forced regime
change, does not negate the socio-political dynamics that were set in place,
which can transmute into heightened virulent form in the contradictory
spaces occasioned by changes in the agents of state power. The state is never
separate from the social world in which it operates and the ethnographies in
this volume explore the intricacies of such relations.
The importance of the ethnographic position in this book is that it engages
with the numerous practices in which the state is revealed and becomes
inscribed in persons and their relations. It is only through such an ethnog-
raphy that a thorough understanding of the modern state in its diverse
formations can be grasped, as well as the complex nature of its effects on
the populations it may contain. I underline the importance of an ethnogra-
phy of the state as extending beyond certain kinds of philosophising, once
more in the ascendant, which – while of fundamental importance – gains
its insights through re-examining well-established texts or else depending
on the constructions of those in dominant positions who, these days, are
engaged in the control of media presentations upon which critics of state
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree iixx 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299
x State Formation
practice have sometimes become over-reliant. These ethnographic essays
not only present original information but, more significantly, have the merit
of transcending received wisdom or intellectual fashions. This should be the
potential of anthropological ethnography, which has the advantage of the
analyst being consciously and analytically located in the contexts of practice
that are to be comprehended. Thus the ethnography is not necessarily illus-
trative of what is already well known, yet another case to add to the pile,
but opens up understandings that are thoroughly dependent on analysis in
situ. As Max Gluckman recommended for a particular anthropology that
he was instrumental in promulgating, ethnography is more than producing
illustrative case material but is the anthropological method whereby regnant
theory can be queried and new understanding developed that is grounded
in the phenomenon being examined.
The editors of this book stress the new direction that the anthropology
of the state is taking one, which is acutely aware of the numerous perspec-
tives that have opened up in related disciplines and fields of inquiry. The
re-insistence on the anthropological stress on culture achieved through
comparative understanding is particularly appealing. It is only through
comparison that particular conceptual or theoretical approaches can be
upheld, more finely honed or ultimately discarded.
The state is an artefact of culture and, in its diversities, engages assump-
tions and practical logics that expand from this fact. In the anthropological
vision that I personally recommend it is not that state practice is meaningful,
one sense of a stress on culture, but that it embeds compositional, construc-
tional and especially orientational doxa and logics which an ethnographic
approach such as those displayed here can best uncover. It is through the
doxa of state practices that the state in its imaginary and materiality has
effects, many of them unintended, much violence being a feature. I add
here that the concentration on power, which is the stress of those who focus
on the state, can overlook the fact that power, even the power of the state,
can arise from practices that may have no immediate or initial link to the
interests of power. A cultural perspective should be alive to this possibility.
While much state power operates hegemonically, as Gramsci, Foucault and
numerous others have insisted, this is a vision of state practice as always
subordinating culture (however this is defined) to power. But the stronger
meaning of culture in much anthropology refers to those meaningful social
practices that are as much constitutive of powerful effects as themselves the
effect of power. To concentrate on the cultural processes of the agents of
state practice is to indicate trajectories of their effective commitments that
are already directed along certain lines with particular potentialities before
they may be intentionally engaged to use them in certain consciously specific
ways. State practices as cultural practices have much more to them than that
which would always intentionally reduce them to the interests of power. The
cultural perspective in anthropology, often arraigned against essentialism
or foundationalism, as in common criticisms of economism, should also be
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree xx 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299
Foreword xi
alive to the risks of reducing phenomena such as the state merely to power.
Power itself is emergent or situated in a diverse field of practices of which
the anthropological attention to culture is acutely aware.
This rich collection of essays opens out to new horizons of thought on the
question of the state. It is a demonstration of the authority of ethnography
and the challenge that such work may offer to already well-tried positions
that need radical re-examination. This is so today, when the very idea of
the state is being reconfigured while new formations of power, control and
sovereignty are coming into more prominent being. These last certainly
have state effects if not states in any conventional or traditional sense. The
excellent studies here go some considerable way to laying a new foundation
for a reinvigorated anthropology of the state.
KKrroohhnn 0000 pprree xxii 22//88//0055 1100::1133::2299