Customer Reviews

Anthropology in the Margins of the State (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The subject of this title has been on my mind for a few years, so when I bumped into it on Amazon I bought it immediately. In the past, anthropology has often focused its stare on ostensibly specific and discrete groups. This book represents a late entry into an anthropology that has turned to face the dynamics of cultural becoming. The central idea is that the state is not absent at its margins and, in fact, is more readily seen as it struggles to obtain some level of certainty in uncertain political terrain. So, nothing revelatory in the thesis-except that anthropologists are saying it. The book contains 11 essays of unequal insight, with Veena Das's 'Paradox of Legibility', and Talal Asad's 'Where are the Margins of the State' being the stand-outs.

I enjoy the detailed analysis of quotidian statecraft without falling back on excruciating Marxist analogs. For that I thank the authors. However, I have a number of gripes. First, there are some shallow, introductory digs at both Giorgio Agamben (p.15) and James Scott (pp.9-10) that I found weak enough to wonder whether the authors making them had actually read the work(s) of their targets. In the end, 'Anthropology in the Margins of the State' lacks a strong theoretical thrust, and some essays flitter a bit too far from the titular topic, and toward a personal micro-journalism. For such reasons, I cannot imagine a casual reader taking much from the book. Rather, this is a collection for anthropologists, and perhaps, for academic professionals in related fields (geography, maybe?).