Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.
France and the sociology of Islam, 1798-1890 -- The Algerian origins of Moroccan studies, 1890-1903 -- The political origins of the Moroccan colonial archive, 1900-1912 -- When paradigms shift : political and discursive contexts of the Moroccan question -- Tensions of empire : institutional contexts of research -- Social research in the technocolony : the colonial archive institutionalized, 1912-25 -- Berber policy : tribe and state -- Urban policy : Fez and the Muslim city -- The invention of Moroccan Islam -- From Moroccan Islam to the ethnographic state.
In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.
This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical textsand cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific stateinstitutions, practices, and processes and outlines ananthropological framework for rethinking future study of “thestate”. Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, andrepresentations that constitute the “state”. Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to thesubject. Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as acultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing,transnational world.
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle. This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history. Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson
Stategraphy—the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors—offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.
The development of Tswana 'merafe' (kingdoms) and the arrival of Christianity and colonialism -- Tswana consolidation within the colonial State: development of a postcolonial State embryo -- Cattle, diamonds and the "grand coalition"--The State and indigenous authority structures : ambiguities of co-optation and confrontation -- Tswana domination, minority protests and the discourse of development -- Anti-politics and questions of democracy and domination -- Governmentalization of the State: on State interventions in the population -- Escalating inequality: popular reactions to political leaders.
Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 65, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: Ethnographies of the state have undergone increased scrutiny over recent years. There are several reasons for that: Weber’s famous definition of the state as the ‘human community successfully claiming the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ has been contested by state-deniers such as Radcliffe-Brown (1940/2006) or later ‘fetishists’ including Abrams (1988) and Taussig (1992). They acknowledged the need to pin down the state in practices of everyday life rather than as an abstract ‘fetishised’ unity. Most recently, heightened influence of globalised companies ('corporate turn', Kapferer, 2005), NGOs and transnational organisations such as the IMF and the world bank (Trouillot, 2001) dispersed centres of sovereignty even further. Following historical developments, the study of the state has come full turn from Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ to Foucault’s ‘capillaries’. I will briefly mention several different ethnographic analytics that can help to still trace the state and its effects in this multi-dimensional context – introducing notions of institutions, culture and history as locations for state power – before I focus on the study of a seemingly non-state political expression: resistance. I examine Abu-Lughod’s (1990) mighty claim that where we find resistance, there is power (i.e. the state) with the help of ethnographic case studies from Egypt (Ali, 1996), Botswana (Comaroff, 1985), Malaysia (Scott, 1989), India (Nandy, 1983) and Turkey (Navaro-Yashin, 2002).
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle. This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history. Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson
