Professional Documents
Culture Documents
INTRODUCTION
The dominance of the western European model over state theory in
anthropology and adjacent fields was influentially addressed a generation
Address correspondence to Carol J. Greenhouse, Department of Anthropology, 116 Aaron
Burr Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1011, USA. E-mail: cgreenho@princeton.edu
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ago, by Abrams, Corrigan, and Sayer and others who took the cultural turn as
a route around the interpretive impasse set up by the question of the states efficacy in social life: We have come to take the state for granted as an object of
political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly
unclear as to what the state is (Abrams 1988:59). The path-breaking study
by Corrigan and Sayer (1985) accordingly relates British state formation to
cultural regulationin particular, regulation of the market for labor and, in
a variety of direct and indirect ways, regulation of the working class itself. As
the modern state consolidated around these interests, its agencies selectively
appropriated the moral legitimacy of its constituent political communities, making citizenship into a form of identity. What is made to appear as the State are
regulated forms of social relationship; forms . . . of politically organized subjection . . . The enormous power of the State is not only external and objective; it
is in equal part internal and subjective, it works through us (1985:180).
Much contemporary political ethnography, particularly as addressed
to the ethnography of states, adopts Abrams solution of seeking the states
social effects through the circulation of the idea of the state (Alonso 1994;
Nagengast 1994). More recently, Agambens writings on the state of exception draw attention the other way, to the idea of the peoplespecifically
the precariousness of life chances under a sovereign who makes law without
being accountable to it (Agamben 1998). The authors reviewed here are
deeply engaged in their pursuit of the state idea pertinent to their approaches
in archaeology, linguistic anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, and
comparative politicsand in the process, their approaches, taken together,
highlight critical tensions between these approaches that would not be so
readily visible in the individual works. All four advocate a cultural approach
to the state. Kirch and Chabal=Daloz show us the external and objective
influences of culture on and in the state; Ji and Skidmore show the states
interiority, working through subjective selvesif not as the opium of the citizen (Abrams 1988:82) then as the reality which stands behind the mask of
political practice (Abrams 1988:82).
Yet, at the same time, all four authors approach the state through processes of coercion and physical force as functions of bureaucratic rationality
(Agamben 1998; Weber 1946; 1954), and this makes it difficult to take the
state idea as sufficient for the study of states. To what extent is the cultural
turn limited to a liberal order? To what extent is bureaucratic rationality
inherently a state of exception? We shall return to these linked questions after
reviewing the books as separate projects.
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into private life are out of line. Surrealism in this sense corresponds to the
emptiness mentioned above, a disjunction experienced as critical distance.
The maximum distance within the book itself is the extremity of conditions
in the peri-urban zones created when the regime removed thousands of urban
dwellers out to the floodplain beyond the city, to make room for their monumental architecture and other conspicuous signs of Burmas modernization
downtown. These are discussed in a separate chapter (Fragments of Misery).
To protect her informants in the peri-urban neighborhoods, Skidmore
makes a composite portrait of several locations and combines them under
one pseudonym, Nyaungbintha. In Nyaungbintha, the presence of the military is experienced as a constant threat of arrest, detention, torture, and rape.
The women who are Skidmores main informants in this chapter are dealing
with the wide-ranging exigencies of their forced displacement. The
conditions of Nyaungbintha are miserable on every dimension. Women are
for the most part utterly destitute, their main asset being their own bodies,
for sale or barter both inside and outside their homes. Skidmore estimates that
in Nyaungbintha one-third of all women of reproductive age are engaged in
prostitution as the only viable alternative to the other business opportunities
barred to them by lack of start-up cash (the three dollars needed for a vending
business is beyond most of them). These pages make wrenching reading.
Some women say they hollow themselves out for relief, letting their minds
wander or fly away to their mothers (198199).
The books final ethnographic chapter takes up the theme of the mind
wandering as the ordinary persons most available path between domination and active resistance, both of which they reject (181). Here the association between withdrawal and a Buddhist sensibility is most explicit in
Skidmores account, and she finds it in a range of settingsfrom pastimes
such as video games to more sustained states of sleepwalking (188), the
symptomology of mental illness, and a more complex timespace displacement that Skidmore refers to as subjunctivization (181186). The situation
in Nyaungbintha may leave readers wondering how the behavior of the
men theresoldiers, husbands, clientsconforms to what is otherwise Skidmores account of Buddhist comportment; there may be further room for
nuance along lines of gender, generation, class, and urban=peri-urban differences in this regard. Still, she makes a persuasive case that where Buddhist
practice is compelling for the people she knew, it is a resource for living.
Had the Nyaungbintha chapter come first, readers would perhaps be better
able to grasp the economic devastation as inseparable from the abuses of
the military and the absorbing challenges people face in the city and country
alike.
Beyond her references to recent scholarship on Burma, Skidmore also
draws on the literatures on violence, fear, and trauma that were evidently
among her own resources for making sense of her experience afterwards;
these draw violence into syntax as something other than silence. Skidmores
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nodes in his phylogenetic model of history (1316). One of his key sources
for the phylogenetic approach is Edward Sapir, and some of Kirchs principal
evidence for the Polynesian cultural baseline is linguisticrelying on etymologies to establish the extent of a broadly regional culture based on communities tied to their own lands, ritual specialists expert in the ways of mana and
tapu, settlements with characteristic spaces for collective rites, and authorities
associated with the political=moral communities already noted. Such an
approach is tempting insofar as language horizons are suggestive of contact
and communicative exchange, but fraught since morphemes with common
roots cannot be assumed to involve common meanings and metaphorical
possibilities (see Sapir 1949 [1921]: chapters 7, 9). Still, with Jis account of
linguistic engineering in mind, it is interesting to consider the energy a particular hegemonic vision may induce for morphological and semantic control,
circumstances permitting.
Chapter 2 then turns to Hawaiis independent development. Kirch finds
evidence for the consolidation of a centralized political elite around a divine
king, as well as the emergence of other attributes of statenesscollection of
tribute, maintenance of a state of more or less perpetual war, and displacement
of the chiefs from their former stature as stewards of the land. Although Kirch
observes that Hawaiian states did not always develop out of chiefdoms (72),
the displacement of chiefdoms is crucial to his argument: While Hawaiian
societies were originally organized around Ancestral Polynesian concepts of
chiefship, by the time of their initial engagement with the West they had
crossed a threshold marked by the emergence of divine kingship, and by
the sundering of ancient principles of lineage and land rights based on kinship,
and their replacement with a strictly territorial system (72). By the end of the
chapter, land and labor, war, and the divinity of kings are well established as
the primary attributes of stateness.
In Chapter three, Kirch takes readers to native Hawaiian historical
narrativesmoolelo. Superficially, these are legends of voyaging and
settlement, but Kirch argues that these can be read productively as braided
accounts of political tensions and consolidations expressed as territorial and
dynastic claims. Local historical narratives of epic voyages (87) between
Hawaii and southeastern Polynesia all refer to the same relatively circumscribed period, with no references to voyaging after 1400. This coincides with
archaeological evidence of intensive inter-island movement in the southeastern islands of Polynesia (8788). Fifteenth- and 16th-century narratives focus
on hero-kings with quasi-divine attributes. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they
relate the events of political consolidation on the main islandsprocesses that
Kirch narrates in detail. Kirch accepts these narratives as valid chronicles of
the cultural specificity of historical agency (121), concluding the chapter with
a critique of Western scholarship that would dismiss them as myth (123).
Chapter 4 reviews the archaeological evidence on this same ground
confirming crucial transitions from material evidence of population
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Kirch, supra). That said, they identify key processes that have tended to produce states in Europe, naming these as centralization, monopolization,
differentiation, and institutionalization (227231)and casting doubt as
to whether other forms of political representation, legitimacy, and institutionalization (such as clientelism in Nigeria and other African states, in their discussion) merit the rubric of the state. In their view, a fuller understanding of
culture brings the advantage of a fuller understanding of the diversity of political formsthe state being just one. For this same reason, they argue, states
should not be defined in the abstract, but in relation to the idea of the state
that its relevant political community has in mind (245268)though this
is not a reference to Abrams or others writing from the cultural turn. Without
some theoretical acknowledgment of the extent to which states in mind may
be deeply contested, and state forms constituted in those very contests, one
cannot help but read these formulations as more structural than interpretive.
This ambivalence runs throughout the book. Throughout, the authors
emphasis is on the importance of context, cultures of representation, and local
expectations regarding legitimacy and accountability, and the text is a fine
guide to locating these concerns in relation to comparative politics. But here
there is an interesting impasse, in that their a priori assumption that politics
will register cultural difference at the level of political systemi.e., at the
country levelcommits them to a range of positions that are not always consistent with their eloquent celebrations of interpretivism. Culture remains for
them an independent variable (69)something that explains, but remains
fundamentally abstracted from time, space, social relationships, and interests.
This limits the cultural analysis of politics to symbolic treatments of legitimacy,
accountability, and representation at the topa valuable project but not the
Geertzian one the authors commend.
Limitations and paradoxes aside, this is exactly the book one might wish
to have in multiple copies to share with colleagues in political science, or with
policy-minded students. It elucidates the cultural complexities of political
institutions and makes clear the relevance of comparative politics to understanding histories in place. It helpfully includes two sets of referencesone
for works cited and the other for further reading.
DISCUSSION
Taken together, the books under review demonstrate the on-going critical
interpretive challenges states pose for anthropologyparticularly in the
extreme states examined by Ji, Skidmore, and Kirch, where the issue of legitimacy does not rely on consent. This highlights the absence of an explicitly
political element in the models of the state formulated by Kirch and Chabal
and Daloz. For these authors, states are centralized political locations with
complex means and ends, both material and symbolic, for managing (even
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CAROL J. GREENHOUSE is Arthur W. Marks Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Anthropology Department at Princeton University. A sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the
ethnography of law and politics, she is past president of the Law & Society Association and the
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and a past editor of American Ethnologist.
Her most recent books are The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States (2011) and (as editor) Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, 19 (2010).
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