ANTHR 6453 - [The State in Anthropological Perspective]

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

P. Nadasdy.

The state figures critically - if sometimes implicitly - in most contemporary anthropological analyses. In this course we will examine the history of anthropological (and related) treatments of the state with an eye to destabilizing the received view of the state as a unified entity capable of coherent action. We then engage with recent ethnographic work that views the state more as a process than an entity and grapple with the theoretical and methodological involved in studying the constellation of government agents, institutions, ideological projects, and processes that together constitute what we think of as the state.