Ethnographies of Governing and the Anthropology of States
Conveners: Assa Doron and Andrew Kipnis, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University
Political anthropology has recently been reinvigorated by a wide variety of theoretical approaches including Michael Herzfeld’s conception of cultural intimacy, Michael Taussig’s studies of state terror and the governmentality school’s depictions of neoliberalism. Recent studies of state-society relations have further argued for the need to turn away from a Weberian understanding of the state as an autonomous, reified organization with a unified will and consciousness. All of these theorizations work to open up studies of contemporary political institutions in a manner that focuses beyond elite actors or the few specially designated sites favored by political scientists. This panel will highlight papers that are sensitive to the local, everyday relationships that people have with multiple state institutions, agencies and officials, tracing the ways the state has historically produced and altered concepts of personhood, work, economic and power relations at the level of everyday life. We hope to raise questions about how older institutions and values, articulated through cultural idioms of morality, reciprocity and patronage, are intermingling with newer constructions of power and the state, derived from universal notions of social justice, equality, and the impersonal rule of law; as well as to illuminate how the state is conceptualized, represented, legitimized and its actions contested at the grassroots level. Finally, we are interested in the relationships between transnational processes of governing and national contexts. How do globally circulating policies, institutions, ideas about governing and political strategies move across national boundaries and what acts of translation occur in their movement and localization? Conversely, how do particularly nationalized governing agents import, export, localize and regulate technologies and discourses of governing?
Abstracts
Benjamin Richard Smith, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University - Transforming States: Problematization and Translation in Responses to an Aboriginal 'Crisis'
Gillian G. Tan, University of Melbourne - Inadvertent Brokers: an Ethnography of Tibetan Development Workers
Yasmine Musharbash, Department of Anthropology, University of Western Australia - Fuelling the Feud? An Analysis of Social and Institutional Engagement in a Feud and of the Limitations of Participant Observation
Andrew Kipnis, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University - Audit Culture: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy or Technology of Governing?
Linda Connor, Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies; Nick Higginbotham and Sonia Freeman, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Newcastle - Mining Community at Anvil Hill: State, Civil Society and Global Governance
Susanna Price, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University - Making Continuing Economic Growth Socially Sustainable: Social Assessment in China
Patrick McAllister, University of Canterbury - The Moral Economy of the Migrant in South Africa pre-1994: Reflections on the work of James Scott
Pál Nyiri, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University - Between Encouragement and Control: Tourism, Modernity and Discipline in China
Assa Doron: RSPAS, The Australian National University - A State of Resistance or Resisting the State? Subalterns and their Encounter with the ‘State’ in India
Eleanor Rimoldi, Massey University - Involution, Entropy, or Innovation? Cultural Economics on Bougainville
