Shifting States
University of Adelaide, 11-15 December 2017
This conference aims to extend recent anthropological theorising on the state. Anthropology has long been interested in the comparative study of states, and from the mid-twentieth century onwards, at least, anthropologists have provided rich ethnographic accounts of, and key theoretical insights into, states as institutional and bureaucratic formations, as purveyors of nationalist sentiment (especially in post-colonial settings), and as custodians of public ritual. However, in recent years, a growing body of anthropological work has extended these definitions further still, by drawing attention to the ways in which ‘statecraft’ may be embedded within wider sets of relations, representations, and practices as well.
One key concern of this contemporary literature has been to highlight the ways in which the elements of statecraft are made manifest through, yet may also become dependent upon, different kinds of materialities, including documents, audio-visual media, and different kinds of physical spaces. Another has been to examine the kinds of affective, embodied responses that state processes, practices and systems often generate. A third interest has been to examine what implications all of this has for our understanding of the relationship between states and persons. Against earlier models, which cast the state as a set of discrete institutions that could be (in a sense) ‘set against’ its individual subjects or citizens, this newer scholarship has emphasised the ways in which state imaginaries and practices may be imminent to, and embedded within, processes of socialization and subject formation. In some instances, the two may even become homologous of each other (as they have – some would argue – under the conditions of late-capitalism/neo-liberalism).
There is a sense in which addressing these concerns is becoming more urgent in the current historical moment. In other words, in the context of a rising entertainment-security complex, of increased state secrecy (and eroded personal privacy), of ongoing attempts by post-colonial governments to forge new kinds of settlements with indigenous peoples, of a return to state-led industrialisation across the ‘developing world’, and of growing distrust, across the political spectrum, of ‘globalization’ – to name just a few trends – the need for us to more effectively document, and to theorise, the materialities, affects, and sociologies of states has become more vital than ever. Each of these trends appears to have resulted in states becoming more far-reaching, and powerful, than ever before. Yet paradoxically, each seems to have also resulted in statecraft appearing more contingent, fragile, and contestable, than ever. If states and persons are mutually constitutive of each other, then all of these shifts will inevitably have profound effects for the whole of humanity. Therefore, they not only invite, but in fact demand, focused anthropological attention.
More from the conference website: Shifting States
Keynote Speakers
ASA Firth Lecture 2017
Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest agrarian states
James Scott, Department of Political Science, Yale University
December 11, 2017
James Scott, is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. His publications include The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Yale University Press, 1976, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale Press, 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale Press 1980, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Press, 1998; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 2008, Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2013 and Against the Grain: Plants, Animals, Microbes, Captives, Barbarians and a New Story of Civilization, Forthcoming, Yale Press 2017. He is a mediocre sheep breeder and bee-keeper in Connecticut.
Abstract
The first evidence of domesticated grains appears at least four millennia before anything like agrarian societies based on cultivation appear and even longer before the first identifiable states pop into view on the southern Mesopotamian alluvium. These two facts challenge the implicit standard narrative of plant domestication being the spark that sets Homo sapiens on the beneficent and royal road to sedentary civilization. This account of the earliest states explores the advantages of mobile forms of subsistence, the unforeseeable epidemic diseases arising from the crowding of plants, animals, and grain, and the reasons why all early states were based on millets and cereal grains as a basic subsistence and tax crop. Why have rice, wheat, barley, maize and millet dominated state-formation virtually everywhere? Why, in other words, have there been no cassava, potato, yam, lentil, chickpea or banana states (banana republics don’t count!)? It contends that high mortality and flight led to “wars of capture” and unfree labor in the early states and to fragile polities liable to frequent collapse. The process leading to the first agrarian states may be seen as an accumulation of domestications: of fire, of plants, of livestock, of state subjects, and, finally, of women in the patriarchal family. Each domestication must be seen as gaining control over the reproduction of the life form in question.
Contingent Statecraft: infrastructures, political creativity and experimentation
Penny Harvey, University of Manchester
December 12, 2017
Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where she was also Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change. Since 2012 she has held the position of Professor II in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Peru, Spain and the UK and published widely on politics and state practice, language and communication, technology, engineering, infrastructures and material politics. Recent publications include Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (with Hannah Knox), Cornell University Press, 2015. Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion (edited with Hannah Knox and CRESC colleagues) Routledge, 2013. Infrastructure and Social Complexity (co-edited with Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita), Routledge, 2016. She is finalizing a book with Deborah Poole on decentralization in Peru entitled Experimental States – and starting a new research project on decommissioning energy infrastructures, starting with the Sellafield nuclear site in the UK.
Abstract
This keynote address argues that an ethos of experimentation is of central importance to contemporary neoliberal state politics - characterised by administrative decentralization, economic liberalization, infrastructural investment, and managerial government. Focusing primarily on the indeterminate and emergent forms of political life that take hold around processes of state decentralization in post-war Peru, the address examines the complex politics of scale that mark relationships between diverse instances of the state. The conflicting competencies of national, regional and local agencies are addressed by a proliferation of technical instruments and norms. However, in practice, the diverse origins and orientations of these instruments and norms, foster ambiguity and uncertainty. State functionaries and citizens alike skilfully mobilize the multiple possibilities that the ambiguous regulatory frameworks offer them. But such attempts also have to confront the precarious quality of the political and the arbitrary enactments of power that the ethos of experimentation also provokes. The Peruvian case offers a point of comparison for a more general anthropology of contingent statecraft.
The Chameleon Crown and Constitutional Reform in post-colonial societies: anthropology of the state revisited
Cris Shore, University of Auckland
December 14, 2017
Cris Shore is professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His main research interests lie in the interface between anthropology and politics, particularly the anthropology of policy, Europe and the ethnography of organisations. He is a founder member and co-president of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP), a Section of the American Anthropological Association. He has published extensively on various themes of public interest including the EU and European integration, the state and nationalism, elites, corruption, ‘audit culture’ and higher education reform. His current research includes a study of universities in the global knowledge economy and a Royal Society of New Zealand funded project entitled ‘The Crown and Constitutional Reform in New Zealand and Other Commonwealth Countries’. His most recent book, co-edited with Susan Wright, is Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Knowledge Economy (Oxford: Berghahn Press, 2017).
Abstract
It is fifty years ago since Philip Abrams wrote his seminal lecture on the difficulties of studying the State, yet those difficulties appear even greater today. Many anthropologists today recognize the state’s elusive character and insist that we view it not as a ‘thing’ but as an assemblage of cultural practices and ideological artefact that attributes unity and autonomy to the fragmented and dependent practices of government. However, locating the state and understanding how ‘state effects’ are produced continues to pose problems for anthropological analysis. These challenges, I argue, are compounded in political systems based on the Westminster model of constitutional monarchy where the ‘Crown’ acts as a metonym and conceptual placeholder for the State. In New Zealand, for example, the Crown stands at the heart of the constitution and features prominently in everyday political discourse, as partner to Māori in the Treaty of Waitangi and source of government legitimacy and authority. Yet the concept of the Crown – like constitutional monarchy itself - is poorly understood and curiously hard to discern. Is it the Queen, the Governor General, the Government, the State, the people, a corporation sole or aggregate, a simple metaphor, a relic of Mediaeval political theology or a mask for the exercise of executive power? Typically, it is portrayed as an entity residing above everyday politics that sometimes represents the will of the people and sometimes exercises a will of its own. As legal scholars argue, it is a ‘convenient fiction’, but convenient for who, and what is gained - or lost - by investing public authority in this ambiguous artefact?
Drawing on ethnographic research in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK, this keynote address will explore these questions and try to open up this constitutional ‘black box’ in the context of debates about the transformation of the modern State. As the address will illustrate, the Crown is an elusive, shapeshifting and omnipresent entity which, like the State, has powerful effects. Moving beyond the ontological question of what exactly is the Crown, I ask, ‘how is it represented and understood? Is the Crown a synonym for the State? What can studying its development reveal about the transformation of the state in post-colonial societies? More importantly, what work (symbolic and political) does it perform? Finally, against a background of constitutional crises in all four countries, is the Crown an obstacle to constitutional reform?
Anisogamic imaginaries of state and nation
Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne
December 15, 2017
Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne. He works on the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism and racism. He has worked for many years on the Lebanese diaspora around the world and is currently working towards a manuscript on the topic. His most recent works are Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imaginary (MUP, 2015) and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Polity, 2017).
Abstract
This keynote address is a contribution to debates concerning the specificity of an anthropology state. I particularly emphasise the argument that this specificity lies in the focus on the everyday experience of the state. I explore some of my ethnographic notes regarding the Lebanese diaspora and compare the way Lebanese immigrants to Venezuela, the United States and Australia speak of the State in the countries they have migrated to. I look at the way these experiences are continuously haunted by the imaginary of the Lebanese State. I argue that this experience can be better understood when the imaginaries of the nation are also brought into the analytic/comparative equation. As importantly, I maintain that all these imaginaries cannot be understood outside the fact that migration is a form of hierarchical circulation and exchange structured by colonialism. It is so in so far as it involves a movement from an 'underdeveloped' to a 'developed' country and as such it is a circulation occurring between entities with different statuses. It always carries within it what I will loosely but I hope suggestively call, after Levi-Strauss, an anisogamic dynamic. Understanding the above allows us to also highlight the hierarchical, racialized and gendered nature of the imaginaries of state and nation that immigrants have to negotiate in the process of settlement. To take this into account allows us a better understanding of the diasporic experiences of belonging, and points to the rather narrow and sometimes inadequate conceptions of citizenship on which social and cultural integration policies in Western receiving countries are often formulated.
Plenary Session
Roles and Relationships of Anthropological Associations in the Era of the Neoliberal University and Populist Backlash
Organised by Greg Acciaioli, University of Western Australia
December 12, 2017
This roundtable will focus upon how anthropological associations can operate and what they can offer in an era in which anthropology as a discipline is under assault within universities (e.g. as a major that does not prepare students for a job) and in the wider society (e.g. as a defender of multiculturalism in contexts where the assertion of a core set of values is promoted as a bulwark against terrorism). It will address how anthropological associations can help promote the discipline when it is increasingly losing its disciplinary identity within universities as anthropologists are merged into schools or clusters (e.g. Social and Cultural Studies) rather than departments of anthropology. The roundtable will also address how national and regional associations can strengthen their impact by initiating activities with global associations such as the World Anthropological Union (WAU), International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). After brief presentations by the roundtable participants the session will be open for queries from the floor and discussion among all those present.
Participants: Chandana Mathur (National University of Ireland), Chair, World Council of Anthropological Associations; Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich (Victoria University of Wellington), Chair, Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand; Nigel Rapport (University of St Andrews), Chair, Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth; Greg Acciaioli (The University of Western Australia), President, Australian Anthropological Society