Tag: statePage 2 of 2
Jon Schubert , January 15th, 2018
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Especially …
guestanthropologist , November 14th, 2017
By Ronald Niezen When the United Nations General Assembly convened its annual meeting this September, amid growing nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, U.S. President Donald…
Focaal Web Editor , November 1st, 2017
In the future, people will say, “On the 16th of October, it happened again.” The Kurds were once again betrayed by the international community. Afraid of losing their…
Focaal Web Editor , October 24th, 2017
Reporting from an ongoing fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, the central topic of this piece is the ways in which the vegetarian and the nonvegetarian are understood, practiced, and…
jeremy schmidt , October 4th, 2017
James C. Scott rethinks refuge (primarily in mountain territories) and the flight of the state in the context of his later ideas on where others seek refuge…swamps, marshes,…
Gamwell , July 24th, 2017
In response to several surveys that attempt to quantify happiness, Ryan, Adam, and Aneil spend this episode of This Anthro Life exploring happiness through the lens of fetishism….
Judith Beyer , January 16th, 2017
After a well deserved break during the holiday season, Allegra is back and full of energy for yet another exciting year! We have lots of wonderful stuff –…
guestanthropologist , December 21st, 2016
by Filippo Osella If there is a lesson to be learnt from the long 2016 it is that there is more than one way to disgrace oneself. Calling…
guestanthropologist , November 21st, 2016
by Deniz Seebacher & Julia Büchele The title of James Ferguson’s latest book (2015) draws from (arguably) “the world’s most widely circulated development cliché”: Give a man a fish,…
guestanthropologist , October 31st, 2016
by Bennett Heine Among political and social scientists in recent decades, the phrase ‘give a man a fish…’ has become more a prompt than a platitude, its pregnant ellipses…
Maximilian C. Forte , September 26th, 2016
What is resource nationalism, and why is it important? One of Wikipedia’s shortest entries, “resource nationalism” nonetheless appears in 372 files published by WikiLeaks. Resource nationalism seems t…
John Postill , July 28th, 2016
As stated on its back cover, in this book the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) investigates the state’s ‘extraordinary power of producing a socially ordered world without…
John Postill , July 6th, 2016
Review of Bourdieu, P. (2014). On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992. P. Champagne, R. Lenoir, F. Poupeau, & M. C. Rivière (Eds.). London: Polity….
Josiah Heyman , April 8th, 2016
When we raise questions about the assumed figures of the ‘smuggler’ and ‘trafficker’, we must also in parallel raise questions about agencies, officers, policies, and discourses of the…
Cristiana Strava , March 8th, 2016
Anthropologists have been studying the various phenomena associated with states and ‘state-like’ structures for a long time (cf. Fortes 1940, Leach 1954). It was only in the last…
Focaal Web Editor , December 15th, 2015
Last 11 November, Angola celebrated forty years of independence—a memorable date. However, these celebrations have been overshadowed by a movement of contestation that has turned a spotlight on…
Focaal Web Editor , December 3rd, 2015
With the recent default on debt payment (see Franqui Rivera and Colón-Garcia 2015), Puerto Rico became a failed state. State failure is the inability or incapacity of a…
Focaal Web Editor , November 25th, 2015
Ever felt like the best conversation at the party is happening in the next room? When I did my field research in an urban neighborhood in Java some…
Judith Beyer , July 23rd, 2015
Today we re-post our conversation with Judith Beyer from a joint virtual roundtable with Anthropoliteia. In her commentary, Judith answers the question: “What has struck you the most,…
Dylan Kerrigan - Opeds , August 31st, 2014
What logic connects Ferguson, Gaza and east Port of Spain? What cultural logics connect recent confrontations in Ferguson, Gaza, and east Port of Spain? The short answer is…