Description:
This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of "the state".
- Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the "state".
- Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
- Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.
Review Quotes: "[Sharma and Gupta] have compiled a timely, useful and dense collection of classical and more recent texts that cover the field, as I know it, pretty well." (Critique of Anthropology, 2009)
"The volume presents an innovative and greatly needed introduction to an interdisciplinary research programme between anthropology and political science." (Discourse & Society, February 2008)
"[This) volume's refreshing theoretical approach and range of empirical examples should make it a valuable teaching and reference book for all those concerned with the challenging questions posed by the state." (Political Studies Review)