AKHIL GUPTA

University of California, Los Angeles

DAVID NUGENT
Emory University
SHREYAS SREENATH
Emory University

State, corruption, postcoloniality:

A conversation with Akhil Gupta on the 20th anniversary
of Blurred Boundaries

A B S T R A C T
Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption,
the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State, by
Akhil Gupta, first appeared in print in 1995 in the
pages of American Ethnologist. It went on to become
one of the most important and influential articles of
recent decades. We talked with Akhil Gupta about
how the argument put forward in Blurred
Boundaries came to be. Our conversation touched
on the background of the article and the difficulties
in getting it published; the relationship of the
article to postcolonial scholarship, subaltern
studies, feminist studies, and the then emerging
literature on globalization; its relationship with
other theorists of the state through themes such as
Eurocentrism, reification, fantasy, fetishism, and the
role of culture in the analysis of the state; and
future directions in research on the state, among
them, examining emotion and affect, studying the
most powerful bureaucracies in nation-states, and
developing the emergent literature on corruption.
[state, theory, corruption, Akhil Gupta, interview]

khil Guptas Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption,

the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State first appeared in
print in 1995, in Volume 22, Number 2 of American Ethnologist.
It went on to become one of the most important and influential
articles of recent decades. At the suggestion of AE editor Angelique Haugerud earlier this year, we arranged to speak with Akhil Gupta
to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Blurred Boundaries.
Before turning to the interview itself, however, we offer a brief overview of
the articles citation profile and history to provide a first approximation of
the articles impact.
Blurred Boundaries has been cited no fewer than 1,170 times. This
in itself is remarkable. But aggregate numbers alone do not capture the
profound effect the article has had on the social sciences. From the very
beginning, it has resonated with scholars who work in virtually every
corner of the globe. Within a few short years of publication, the article
was being cited in works dealing with Africa (sub-Saharan and Saharan),
the Middle East, and Eurasia; South, Southeast, and East Asia; Melanesia,
the Caribbean, and Europe; and South, Central, and North America.
Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find scholarship on any part of
the world that has not engaged in serious ways with the argument of
Blurred Boundaries. Thus, although its empirical focus is contemporary
India, the article was quick to enter, and to help define, a global arena of
academic discussion and debate.
The full impact of Blurred Boundaries, however, cannot be gauged
simply by noting how extensively it has been cited or by observing that
it has resonated with scholars around the world. Equally striking is the
articles citation in many different kinds of publications. Among them
are prestigious disciplinary journals, like American Ethnologist, American
Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, and the Journal of the Royal

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 581591, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12157

American Ethnologist

Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

Anthropological Institute, as well as major interdisciplinary

journals, such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Public Culture, and Social Text.
The impact of Blurred Boundaries, however, extends
well beyond these prominent publication venues. The
article has been equally influential among scholars who
publish in journals that focus on regional issues. There
are far too many of these publications to name them
all, but the list includes the Journal of Asian Studies and
the Polish Sociological Review, Africa and the Journal of
Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Portuguese
Diaspora Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. The argument of Blurred Boundaries has also been taken up by
scholars who publish in journals that focus on thematic
issues. Again, sheer numbers make it impossible to name
them all, but they run the gamut from PoLAR and Forum
for Development Studies to Political Geography, Third
World Quarterly, Census and Identity, and Rural Sociology.
Blurred Boundaries has even found its way into outlets
such as Accounting, Organization and Society, and World
Bank Policy Research Working Papers. A further indication
of the impact Blurred Boundaries has had on global
conversations in the social sciences is its wide citation in
journals published in languages other than English, including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian,
Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
All in all, Blurred Boundaries has been cited in
652 different journals. Moreover, its argument has been
engaged in 204 books and monographs, bringing the total
number of different publications in which it has informed
academic discussion and debate to 856. The argument
presented in this work has been remarkable in crossing
disciplinary, regional, thematic, and linguistic divides.
Few works have traveled as far and as wide as Blurred
Boundaries.
In light of the strikingly original nature of the argument
presented in this influential article, we thought it would
be interesting to explore its intellectual genesis and path
to publication. The conversation that follows addresses
four general themes: the background that informed the
argument in Blurred Boundaries, the reception to the
initial draft during the publication process, the argument
presented in the article itself, and the reception it received
after publication.

Background to the argument

David Nugent and Shreyas Sreenath: Blurred Boundaries
is striking in that it draws on a wide range of intellectual
interlocutors, from the subaltern studies collective to dependency theory, from critical state theory to postcolonial
theory. The article also engages scholarship that is drawn
from multiple disciplines and that focuses on a broad range
of world regions, from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa,

582

from South Asia to Europe. Authors are not always engaged

in such an interesting and broad-ranging set of conversations. Could you talk a bit about how you found yourself at the intersection of these multiple influences and
debates? To what extent do you attribute the focus of
Blurred Boundaries, and your scholarly interests in general, to the unusual nature of your graduate education?
Akhil Gupta: My academic training was transdisciplinary
not by design but because I followed my interests across
disciplines. My background is in engineering, and my chief
interests there were in appropriate technology and renewable energy. My bachelors thesis (in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering at Western Michigan University,
1977) dealt with solar energy, and my masters thesis (in
the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, 1980)
was on geothermal energy. When I was doing my Ph.D.
in EngineeringEconomic Systems at Stanford University,
I did all the coursework that was required of doctoral students in economics. But because of my interests in social
theory, I also read widely in other fields and even took
some classes in those disciplines. Anthropology attracted
me immensely, and I was very fortunate to be included
in a reading group convened by Sylvia Yanagisako, whose
other graduate student members were Anna Tsing, Lisa
Rofel, and Roger Rouse. But I also read other disciplines
such as history, historical sociology, feminist theory, political theory, literary theory, and philosophy. The common
thread through these enormous reservoirs of knowledge
was an interest in work that had been inspired by Marx.
That eclectic training has stayed with me because it has
given me a body of work that I can build on, critique, and
interrogate.
My first published essay was a subaltern interpretation of
a peasant revolution in South India (Gupta 1984a, 1984b).
Having read E. P. Thompson (1966) on the English working
class and the movement to write history from below, I was
immediately taken by the subaltern studies project. What
attracted me to it was its legacy from Gramsci and Thompson on thinking class through culture, which also opened
it up to anthropology. Gramscis and Thompsons insistence
that class conflict, although structurally central to capitalism, was never experienced as such, but was lived through
existing forms of social inequality based on race, gender,
caste, ethnicity, religion, and other factors, helped me see
that one needed a much more supple, historically informed,
culturally mediated understanding of capitalism. Finally,
the feminist scholarship that was a formative influence on
me taught me to pay attention to the everyday, to informal
labor in the household, to the relation between production
and reproduction, and to be suspicious of the heroic, masculinist, working-class narratives constructed by people like
E. P. Thompson.

A conversation with Akhil Gupta

My exposure to scholarship from different world locations

came from the fact that the literature I was reading emerged
from an empirical engagement with specific places. In this
limited sense, I was fortunate not to be trained as an area
scholar because I did not need permission to roam outside my chosen area. For example, a lot of the French Marxist anthropology that I first encountered in classes taught
by Donald Donham was about Africa (Godelier 1973; Meillassoux 1981; Terray 1972), so I learned something about
sub-Saharan Africa; dependency and world-systems theory
was largely set in Latin America and Africa (Amin 1974;
Bernstein 1973; Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Rodney 1972;
Wallerstein 1974); the modes of production debate and
the transition to capitalism debates raged most heatedly
in South Asian studies, along with European, African, and
Latin American contexts, et cetera (Alavi 1975; Aston and
Philpin 1987; Foster-Carter 1978); some of the classic texts
in peasant history and peasant movements had to do with
Europe, Tokugawa Japan, et cetera (Ginzburg 1962; Ladurie
1976; Scheiner 1970).
DN/SS: You mention that the common thread running
through the diverse literatures you read was the work of
Marx. In what circumstances did you first read Marx? Which
core ideas, concerns, perspectives, or methodologies did
you take away from that reading?
AG: My first encounter with Marx was through the young
Marxhis more philosophical works like the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (1964) and The German Ideology
(1967). Through Marx, I deepened my understanding of
Hegel; I had obtained an invaluable start by reading Charles
Taylors (1977) magisterial work on Hegel. I also was an
avid reader of the journal Radical Philosophy and was
introduced to Spinoza through the work of Bertell Ollman
(1977). I also read the analytical Marxists like G. A. Cohen
(1978), Jon Elster (1985), John Roemer (1978a, 1978b, 1989),
and others. Subsequently, I learned a fair amount of Marxian and Ricardian economics in the economics courses
taught by Donald Harris, which led me to appreciate the
importance of the classical tradition in thinking about
the broad trajectories of capitalist development as well
as the proximity of the Marxian tradition to the Ricardian
one. Pranab Bardhans work (1984; Bardhan and Rudra
1980, 1981) showed me how to take these concepts and
work with them carefully using empirical material from
the Indian countryside. My introduction to literary theory
came via Raymond Williamss Marxism and Literature
(1978), and through Roland Barthes (1972) I came to delve
more deeply into semiotics and structuralism, especially
the work of the Russian formalists. I learned Marxist
sociology by reading the Frankfurt SchoolHabermas
(1989), Benjamin (1969), Adorno (1973), and Horkheimer
(1975)but also American sociologists such as Braverman

American Ethnologist

(1974) and Burawoy (1982). My introduction to Marxist

history was through Perry Anderson (1974), Paul Sweezy
(1942), Robert Brenner (1976, 1977), Maurice Dobb (1946),
and the debates about the development of capitalism.
Although I did not realize it at the time, looking back, I feel
that I did receive a really good transdisciplinary education
centered around the Marxist corpus.
I learned many other things as well. I was fortunate to find
at Stanford scholars who were at the forefront of feminist
scholarship such as Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier, who
were, in turn, colleagues of scholars like Bridget OLaughlin
and Shelly Rosaldo and continued that legacy. I was also
fortunate to be well trained in neoclassical economics and
developed a good appreciation for Durkheimian and Weberian traditions in anthropology. Through classes in history, I began to understand problems of historiography, and
through classes in literary theory, an appreciation for the
difficulty and importance of close reading, et cetera. What
this eclectic training gave me was the ability to translate
from the scholarly language used in one discipline to another. It also helped me to recognize the vast differences
that exist in the mode of making arguments in diverse disciplines. Very often, the reason we talk past each other in
related disciplines is not because we fail to understand the
literal meaning of what someone is saying but because we
fail to comprehend its significance. Learning early in my
scholarly career that very smart people in different traditions of learning have completely different modes of constructing arguments has allowed me to be suspicious of
disciplinary imperialisms. One of the central objectives of
my graduate seminars is to train my students not to dismiss what they have read but to ask, What have I learned
from this text? Before they take an author to task for his or
her obvious mistakes, I tell students that they need to ask
themselves why someone so intelligent chose to write what
she or he did. Almost all the time, the error lies not with
the author but with the readers inability or unwillingness
to hear what the author is really saying. For example, although anthropology and history are relatively close as disciplines, they make arguments in very different ways. Doing
cross-disciplinary work means first appreciating the rigor
and insight that different disciplines bring to the study of
the same subject.
The Marxist tradition taught me to always pay attention
to who appropriated the surplus and how, and from that
to attend to inequalities flowing from class, race, gender,
caste, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, et cetera. One of the
reasons I became disenchanted with economics was that it
had far too few tools to understand inequality, and it was
uninterested in the existential situation of the exploited and
the oppressed. Anthropology, like geography, is an undisciplined discipline; it allowed me to roam and bring insights

583

American Ethnologist

Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

together from very different domains. People are sometimes surprised that my published work cites references
from so many different disciplines; however, that is how I
read. It is just as easy (or difficult) for me to read a paper in economics as in literature, and it is very freeing to
know that I do not have to pause at some border of intelligibility in pursuing any topic in which I happen to be
interested.

Reception prior to publication

DN/SS: It is hard not to notice that the review process for
Blurred Boundaries in American Ethnologist was unusually long and protracted. Could you talk a bit about how the
paper was received by reviewers prior to publication and
how that reception did or did not shape the argument that
ultimately appeared in print? Were there particular aspects
of the argument that reviewers found especially interesting
or important? Were there aspects of the work that reviewers
found especially problematic or troubling?
AG: For some reason that I could not understand then, and
still do not fully understand today, the article touched a raw
nerve among some scholars. There was not much work on
corruption then, even less than there is now, and within
anthropology very little had been done on the state. One
would, therefore, have thought that the field was wide open
for many different contributions, and that is the way I always approach any topic.
I first wrote Blurred Boundaries for a workshop convened
by comparative political scientists on state-society relations. When I submitted the paper for the volume that
grew out of the workshop, the editors rejected it. I do not
quite remember what the rationale was, but it was clear
that the paper did not fit the model being proposed in that
volume.
I then promptly sent the paper to American Ethnologist.
When the first set of four reviews came in after a long gap,
they were mostly positive with one exception. That one review was intensely negative. However, the long time that
this reviewer took delayed the article considerably. The editor encouraged me to revise and resubmit and decided not
to send the resubmitted article to the negative reviewer. The
editors job in such a case is very difficult, but Don Brenneis, who was editor at that time, is nothing if not fair and
balanced. However, in the middle of this process, the editor
of AE changed, with Michael Herzfeld replacing Don Brenneis. In the second round, the reviews were all positive but
the new reviewer selected by Michael was more critical of
the paper than the others and had some legitimate questions. I revised it and sent it back for the third round. This
time, the editor only sent it to the new reviewer, who was

584

still not completely happy but willing to compromise and

approve the article for publication. I revised it yet again,
and it was finally accepted three years after it had been first
submitted.
There were two insights that I gained from this process:
You need to have a thick skin to survive the blows of the
review process, and if you do not have a thick skin, or do
not develop one, it makes it much harder to succeed in
the academic world. In a way, I was fortunate to see the
nasty review, because otherwise I would not have known
how even senior scholars suffer from insecurities and hide
behind the anonymity of the review process to protect
their turf and keep potential competitors from emerging.
It taught me something useful, and to this day I have never
written a review that is dismissive or sarcastic. Nobody benefits from such a review. If I feel that an essay I am reviewing
is weak, I try to find where its real and potential strengths
lie, and if I recommend that it not be published, I give
very concrete suggestions on how the essay can be revised.
This takes a lot more time, but I feel that if I cannot do as
much, then I should not take on the task of reviewing the
essay.
Secondly, it showed me the value of having a fair editor. A
judicious editor is able to reach his or her own conclusions
and is able to guide an inexperienced contributor about
which suggestions to take seriously and which ones to ignore. In this sense, the editors role is more like that of a
mentor, and both Don Brenneis and Michael Herzfeld performed that role admirably.
Finally, this process taught me that one should never give
up. It is really important to listen to the reviewers, but it is
inevitable that reviewers will pull you in their favorite directions, and you need to be able to balance the many good
suggestions on offer with your own vision of where the article is going. One has to strike a fine balance between being open to suggestions and not letting ones own voice be
drowned by the different directions in which the reviewers
will want the article to go.
One of the fortunate side-effects of the fact that the review process took so long was that I had the chance to
present Blurred Boundaries before many different audiences. From each such presentation, I gained insights into
where the argument was weak, or unclear, or likely to be
misinterpreted. In addition, these presentations allowed me
to gauge how it would be received by prospective audiences.
I knew that the article struck a chord among the many audiences to whom it was presented, and thus I had a lot of
confidence that I was on to something. Having faith in yourself and believing in what you do is absolutely central to the
academic endeavor.

A conversation with Akhil Gupta

The argument in Blurred Boundaries

DN/SS: It is interesting that you begin Blurred Boundaries
by discussing how the particular cultural configuration of
state/civil society is untenable in postcolonial contexts.
As you were writing the article, did you see the charge of
postcolonial scholarship as a primary impetus to conduct
an ethnography of the Indian state? What specific works
were important to you and why?
AG: I have to stress that the primary impetus for the
article was not theoretical. My interest in the state as an
object of ethnographic inquiry grew out of what I had experienced in the field. The first paragraph of the article truly
describes why I started work on the stateI had no idea
that it would be an interesting topic. I had encountered
previous work on the state and political power in Jane
Colliers classes in political anthropology. It is only when I
started looking for literature on the state that I discovered
that shockingly little had been done on the topic. I drew
on the anthropology of bureaucracy that I could find:
Michael Herzfelds (1992) influential book on bureaucratic
indifference and Don Handelmans (1978, 1981) early
work. As one elder in the discipline told me, previous
generations of anthropologists who worked in village
India had always known of the primary school teachers,
the agricultural extension agents, the village-level health
workers, the community development agents, the land
records keepers, and a whole host of government agents
who were frequently found in villages as residents or as
visitors. However, since there was no place for the modern
state in a village ethnography, these people were often
written out of the published account. Very often, state
officials were there but escaped notice, and much like
missionaries and colonial officials, were sometimes only
glimpsed out of the corner of the ethnographers eye.
In choosing topics for research, I have always allowed myself to be guided by what I found in the field rather
than begin the process of what to research from contemporary theoretical debates. Of course, my purely theoretical essays are motivated largely by theoretical debates and
interests, but I have always maintained that new research
directions are best when they come out of engagement with
phenomena that are important to the people with whom
one is working. Doing engaged anthropology in that sense
is very important to me. If I work on issues that are important to the people whose lives I am researching, I can perhaps contribute something to making their lives better. I am
seldom overtaken by theoretical anxiety because I feel that
no matter what topic one works on, there is always something that one can contribute theoretically. It does not work
as well the other way around.

American Ethnologist

Sometimes, problems and issues that you discover in the

field actually lead you to novel theoretical terrain. Conversely, following the lead of current theoretical debates
sometimes leads to fieldwork that appears dated when it
is published. Although I write in both ethnographic and
ethnological registers, the ethnographic has for me always
been central. My critiques of the field and fieldwork were
never an apology or an excuse to not continue to do deep,
immersive fieldwork. It is true that one can get a lot more
published if one embellishes what are basically theoretical essays with a patina of fieldwork. Or one can eschew
fieldwork altogether in favor of writing in an ethnological register, which consists of reading the existing ethnographic record and reinterpreting other peoples primary
research. However useful such work might be as an intervention in contemporary theoretical debates, I seriously
doubt whether it has an enduring character and worry
that it will cease to be read after the theoretical debates in
which it participates have lost their significance. We continue to read the ethnographic work of Malinowski, EvansPritchard, Leach, and Geertz, and it is not because the
theoretical debates concerning functionalism, structuralfunctionalism, and symbolic anthropology continue to occupy us.
All of this is a long-winded way to say that it was not postcolonial scholarship that led me to the critique of the
state/civil society distinction. Rather, it was my observations in the field that led me to look for insights in the postcolonial literature.
In terms of theoretical influences, this particular essay
lies at the conjunction of subaltern studies (Amin 1984;
Chakrabarty 1989; Chatterjee 2007; Gramsci 1971; Guha
1983; Kaviraj 1989; Thompson 1966), postcolonial studies
(Bhabha 1984, 1994; Said 1979; Hall 1985; Spivak 1988),
and the literature on globalization (Appadurai 1990; Frank
1979; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1992; Mandel 1975; Wallerstein
1974). I was teaching a class at Stanford with my former
teacher and greatest theoretical influence, Sylvia Yanagisako, entitled Marxisms, Feminisms, Postmodernisms
in which we were juxtaposing feminist texts by Audre
Lorde (1984), Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (1981),
Norma Alarcon (1981), bell hooks (1984), Trinh Minh-ha
(1989), Chandra Mohanty (1984), Emily Martin (1987), Janice Radway (1984), and Gayatri Spivak (1988), among others, to Michel Foucault (1970, 1973, 1978, 1980), Dipesh
Chakrabarty (1989), Paul Gilroy (1987), Antonio Gramsci
(1971), Louis Althusser (1969), and Stuart Hall (1985). It was
a wonderfully productive and generative moment in the
history of anthropology, and my work was heavily influenced by these crosscurrents.

585

American Ethnologist

Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

DN/SS: How did you see the postcolonial critique of European categories relate to various theories of the state that
you were exploring in your article (Abrams 1988; Mitchell
1988; Nugent 1994; Taussig 1991)?
AG: The postcolonial critique really forced us to think about
how much our knowledge and apprehension of the world
was through Eurocentric categories and modes of thought.
Having arrived at universal and general models through
a particular historical experience, those models were then
employed to understand the rest of the world. And the
rest of the world turned out to be defective and incomplete by the standards of Eurocentric universalism: insufficiently secular and democratic; lacking constitutional rights
and legal frameworks to conduct business, regulate conflict,
give citizens rights, et cetera; not providing adequate frameworks for equality on lines of gender, ethnicity, and race;
ruled by weak states that did not stand apart from civil society, where corruption and lack of transparency were the
norm; not sufficiently cohered by the moral compass of nationalism, et cetera. Thus, the question of why nationstates in the global South did not look like those in the
global North, why they were less wealthy, less developed,
was always answered by what they lacked: a transparent, efficient, accountable government; a strong state; a true domestic bourgeoisie; constitutional guarantees of property
rights; the rule of law; a properly functioning constitutional
democracythe list is potentially limitless. And the state always played a large role in such explanations of lack: It was
often the chief source of lack.
DN/SS: You cite Taussigs chapter from The Nervous System
titled Maleficium: State Fetishism along with Abramss
Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. As you know,
Taussig explicitly draws on Abramss insights, animating his
chapter with an interesting thesisthat the state is a mask
that obscures political practice, a mask that starts its life
as an implicit construct and later takes on a reified and
fetishistic form, imbuing itself with tremendous symbolic
power (Abrams quoted in Taussig, p. 113). Taussig especially
focuses on how the state fetish derives its power from the
fantasies of its ruled subjects. How do you see fantasy and
fetishism figuring into your articulations of the role that
public culture plays in the discursive construction of the
state? Here we are especially thinking of the striking conversation you describe involving Ram Singh and his son after
the television news broadcast (Gupta 1995:390).
AG: I felt that the work of Abrams, Taussig, Nugent, Mitchell,
and others opened up the question of the state in interesting new ways that departed significantly from the existing Marxist critiques of the state (Miliband 1969; Poulantzas
1973). These writers, even when they were not explicitly
drawing on poststructuralist thought, were using a similar

586

set of insights. Their work helped reveal the enormous effort that went into making natural the boundary between
state and society, or the elaborate mechanisms that allowed
the state to represent itself as a unified and coherent actor. While the insight into the state as a reification was not
new (that is why Marx called it the executive committee of
the ruling class), Abramss and Taussigs emphasis on such
processes did raise fresh questions about the complicity of
the ruled in the making of the state as a fetish. Fantasy and
fetishism are an integral form of power, and of state power
in particular, as Mbembe (1992) so brilliantly argued in his
famous essay, using Bataille and bodily excreta to make his
point. What postcolonial theory enabled me to do was to
further decenter and deconstruct this apparatus of rule to
reveal its sedimentation in European history and to argue
for the inadequacy of its logics to the global South.
DN/SS: There are some interesting absences in Blurred
Boundaries, such as Poulantzass Political Power and Social Classes (1973), Althussers Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses (1971), and Foucaults Governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991). Especially as the latter two would
be later published in your Anthropology of the State reader
(Sharma and Gupta 2006), is there any particular reason
that you decided not to include these pieces in Blurred
Boundaries?
AG: Foucault once remarked that he quoted Marx without
saying that he did, and because people did not recognize
Marxs texts, they thought that he did not read Marx or use
him. I have worked so long and so closely with Marx and
Althusser that their texts inform my own work in ways that
I can no longer separate from my own. Thus, I rarely cite
them explicitly. As for Foucaults essay on governmentality, when I first wrote Blurred Boundaries, that essay had
not yet been translated and published. It did become available to me before final revisions, but it would have taken
too long to integrate its insights into the essay. Grappling
with that essay in fact paralyzed me for some time as I began to wonder if the planned book on the state was worthwhile. Eventually I did go ahead with the project, keeping in
mind Foucaults objections, but also arguing that the focus
on governmentality did not make attention to the state less
important but forced us not to think of the state as the only
thing that mattered. Foucaults critique of the state is analogous to a Weberian critique of capitalism that argues that
by ignoring the bureaucratization and instrumental rationality that is the hallmark of capitalist modernity, Marxist
approaches to capitalism missed the continuities between
corporations, governments, and civic bodies, which are the
decisive factors shaping the present.
DN/SS: You mention that ethnographies of the state can
counter research that emphasizes large-scale structures,

A conversation with Akhil Gupta

epochal events, major policies and important people. Can

you speak a bit more on the cultural work that is done to
produce the state as an epochal, eventful, and largescale social entity?
AG: My point was that the state in books like Bringing the
State Back In (Evans et al. 1985) was precisely that machine
that operated with a capital S. Analogous with machismo,
one could call this approach to state theory Statismo. The
problem with such an approach is that it reinforces the cultural work that ruling groups do to produce the state as the
center of action and policy, the agent of social change, the
decider who even decides the state of exception. The state
as embodied by the sovereign (the king, legislature, parliament, steel frame of the bureaucracy) is one in which an
agent, however such an agent is construed, can make things
happen. My instinct, honed by subaltern studies, has been
to resist such formulations.
What is the content of such cultural work? This is precisely
where public culture comes in: Television, radio, and newspapers are complicit in producing the state as a unitary
actor with a head and a chain of command. Militaries and
police who cudgel any opposition into submission also
produce the effect of a unified state. When such actions are
reported by the media, they multiply in effectiveness and
reinforce the idea of a powerful, coordinated, singular state.
But the illusion of the state is not produced by public culture alone but by actions in thousands of different domains
of a bureaucratic order that educates citizens to submit
to the state and to respect state authority repetitively in a
thousand small acts in everyday life.
DN/SS: One of the more interesting arguments you make in
Blurred Boundaries concerns the translocality of the state.
The Manchester School is well known for having engaged
issues of translocality. Was your argument influenced at all
by the writings of Manchester School authors? Did you find
sources of inspiration in the work of other scholars?
AG: I was influenced indirectly by the Manchester School
through the work of people like John and Jean Comaroff,
whose connection to that influential body of work may not
be obvious to everyone. However, it was really my immersion in Marxist debates about imperialism, the mode of production, the world system, and dependency theory that first
drew my attention to the irreducible translocality of social
life. I began to appreciate the cultural aspects of the translocal through critiques of nationalism in the work of subaltern
scholars like Partha Chatterjee and Amitav Ghosh and then
in the tremendously exciting new work on globalization that
was pioneered by Arjun Appadurai, who has always been
one of the major influences on my scholarship.

American Ethnologist

DN/SS: Works like Purity and Danger, by Mary Douglas

(1966), remind us that anthropologists have long been fascinated by cultural boundaries. By drawing explicit attention to the blurring of boundaries, however, you provide
a compelling new way of engaging with an old problem
one that problematizes boundaries rather than taking them
as givens. When you were formulating the argument of
Blurred Boundaries, did you regard yourself as being in
conversation with scholars like Mary Douglas?
AG: Although I had read Mary Douglas and found, for example, her work on the prohibitions of Leviticus to be a spellbinding analysis, I was not consciously thinking of her when
I chose the title for the essay. I may have had Geertzs title
Blurred Genres in mind, but mostly the inspiration came
from the phenomenon itself. In many analyses of what was
lacking in the postcolonial state, the answer was about the
failure to construct adequately the boundary between state
and society: The state was permeated by society and failed
to remain autonomous and sovereign; or society was dominated by the state and unable to constitute an environment for civil society to flourish, which would act as a brake
on arbitrary and capricious behavior by the sovereign or
state officials. What I wanted to indicate by the title was
that the blurring of boundaries was not an anomalous feature that was characteristic of an unhealthy state but the
normal condition of most states, particularly postcolonial
ones. My point was that our analytical apparatus had to be
built around a particular configuration of relationships and
institutions, rather than simply imposed on an empirical
situation. Using statesociety relations as an analytic, the
danger was that scholars (inadvertently) ended up employing categories and forms that arose from a European context and, not surprisingly, found that states elsewhere failed
to conform to those preconfigured analytical divisions. At
the same time that they functioned as analytical categories,
ideas of state, civil society, and the family also smuggled in
normative and ethical judgments. By this yardstick, nonWestern states would always be deficient. That seemed to
me an elementary weakness in much of this literature.

Reception after publication

DN/SS: Of the works you cite, a number have found what
we might think of as a permanent home in anthropological discussions of corruption and the state. Other works
that you draw on, however, have not. For example, you appear to have been influenced in important ways by the conclusion of Dipesh Chakrabartys book Rethinking Working
Class History (1989), a work that is not well-known by anthropologists who work outside India. Were there aspects
of the argument in this work, or others that you were influenced by, that you think deserve more systematic attention

587

American Ethnologist

Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

than they have received? Do you have any thoughts regarding why these works have not been more widely embraced
by anthropologists?

after having written this book? What aspects of state formation and bureaucracy do you feel still need to be urgently
focused on?

AG: Rethinking Working Class History is an absolutely brilliant book, and people who have read subsequent work by
Dipesh Chakrabarty should revisit the book, its conclusion
in particular. I read Chakrabarty as part of my immersion
in subaltern studies. With my interest in peasant revolutions, I was fascinated by Ranajit Guhas Elementary Aspects
of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) because it
rethought so many aspects of peasant movements that had
gone unnoticed or unremarked in the literature, all through
a structuralist logic of negation. Some of the remarkable
monographs published under the rubric of subaltern studies went unread among anthropologists and specialists of
other areas because they were so deeply woven into the debates and arguments around Indian historiography that it
would be hard for someone outside the region to appreciate them. Cultural history is doubly difficult to translate, because someone who does not know the region or its history
is likely to find much of it opaque.

AG: The major difference between the version of Blurred

Boundaries that was first published in American Ethnologist and that which appeared in Red Tape had to do with
context and focus. By the time I wrote the book, my focus had shifted much more acutely to the problem of
the states relation to very poor people. Twenty years of
rapid economic growth had not substantially changed the
conditions of the poorest, and the book is animated by
barely contained rage. A historic opportunity has been lost,
and it is made worse by what can only be called a scandalous degree of complacency among policy makers and
middle-class citizens. Paralysis or despair did not seem like
adequate responses in the face of such a discouraging situation. Therefore, apart from citing the new literature that
had been published in the intervening years, the new version stresses the importance of an ethnography of bureaucracy to the life-chances of the poorest.

Like all disciplines, anthropology benefits and suffers from

its intellectual fashions, but with a peculiar twist. The benefit is that intellectual fashions focus attention on interesting
new ideas and there is real ferment around those topics for
a while, leading to new perspectives and the development
of thought. The peculiar disadvantage that anthropology
suffers from, which is not true of ancillary disciplines like
cultural geography, is that ethnographic work that is deeply
informed by new perspectives takes a while to develop and
bear fruit. By the time people have actually brought new
ethnographic evidence to the discussion in a systematic
way, the theoretical field moves on to newer topics. Thus,
the danger is that those ideas are never interrogated with
the ethnographic archive. Further, it encourages people
to focus on theoretical questions and/or ethnological
speculation, rather than on long-term, first-rate primary
field research.
At the AAA Meetings in 1989, I had convened a panel with
the title The Ethnography of the State. (One of the presenters was Ashraf Ghani, now president of Afghanistan.) In
my paper, I called for more anthropological research on the
state. Blurred Boundaries was an attempt to demonstrate
just why it was so important to do this work, and what could
be its benefits. However, as the history of the reception of
Blurred Boundaries demonstrates, it took a while for this
message to be heard.
DN/SS: A work that focuses directly on the operation of
bureaucracy is your recent monograph, Red Tape (2012).
In what ways has your thinking about the state changed

588

The more I work on the state, the more skeptical I become

of theories of the state seen as some kind of singular and
unified entity. Problems of coordination, scale, and representation make it hard for me to imagine what the state
is, and what it can do, and why it appears so unproblematical to so many people, including to officials. That is an
anthropological problem par excellence that can be investigated with ethnographic tools. The approach I am advocating would not unmask the state and demonstrate that
it is an illusion but, rather, seek to understand why the illusion makes sense to so many people, including scholars.
Would we be skeptical of the body of literature on witchcraft
if most scholars of witchcraft were practitioners? Why then
do we not have any trouble with scholars of the state who
operate with that reification and seem to accept it unproblematically?
In terms of areas that still need to be urgently studied,
let me mention two in particular, one theoretical and
one conjuncturalpolitical. The theoretical one concerns
the emotional and affective relations between people and
states. From the history of totalitarian and repressive states,
we know that states often instill fear and terror in their subjects and are themselves full of irrational fears and fantasies. But how do they engender love, affection, awe, and
commitment? Ideologies of nationalism are central here,
but so are other mechanisms. Ethnographic investigations
of the whole gamut of emotional connections between
states and subjects are rather sparse. In the study of state
officials, institutions, and practices, even fewer examples
can be found of the affective. I think both affect and emotion are important, and this is to my mind one of the most

A conversation with Akhil Gupta

significant areas that anthropology can open up in the study

of the state. Why are citizens on the whole cynical and disaffected in some nation-states whereas in others the majority
feel that the state is their protector or speaks for them? In
my own research, I ask how antipoverty programs can work
without citizens investments in making sure that such programs do in fact reach their intended beneficiaries. When
subjects are cynical of state policies, even the intended beneficiaries are less likely to be interested in such programs,
severely reducing the chances of their success. There is a
downward spiral that leads from cynicism to policy failure
to greater cynicism. As a practical, urgent matter, therefore,
we need to understand how such spirals can be reversed.
And we have very little to guide us as scholars, practitioners,
and policy makers in this regard. The theoretical and political importance of the study of emotion and affect cannot be
underlined enough.
A second area where anthropology has a lot more to contribute to the understanding of states is in studying those
government bureaucracies that are considered powerful in
nation-states own representations. Thus, for example, we
have a lot of ethnographic work on welfare bureaucracies
but barely any on finance ministries, defense departments, the military, internal security ministries, police
departments, courts, and legislatures. Although studying
bureaucracies is by definition studying up, much of the
study of bureaucracy is about low-prestige departments,
that is, bureaucracies that are not seen as the most powerful
or most important bureaucracies in the nation-state. As a
result, whether it is the financial crash of 2009 in the United
States or the Arab Spring of 201113, we know far too little
about the bureaucracies involved in (not) regulating Wall
Street firms or the police and army that were suppressing
uprisings all over the Middle East.
Finally, I wanted to say that Blurred Boundaries also
helped to further an interest in the topic of corruption.
Anthropologists have contributed surprisingly little to the
study of corruption as compared to sister disciplines like
political science, economics, and sociology. Fortunately,
there is now a vigorous literature on this topic, and that
interest may have contributed to this essays longevity.

References cited
Abrams, Philip
1988 Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977). Journal
of Historical Sociology 1(1):5889.
Adorno, Theodor W.
1973 Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Alarcon, Norma
1981 The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back
and Anglo-American Feminism. In This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Cherrie Moraga

American Ethnologist

and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. Pp. 140152. London: Persephone

Press.
Alavi, Hamza
1975 India and the Colonial Mode of Production. Economic and
Political Weekly 10(3335):12351262.
Althusser, Louis
1969 For Marx. Ben Brewster, trans. London: Verso.
1971 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards
an Investigation. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
Pp. 127186. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Amin, Samir
1974 Accumulation on a World Scale. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Amin, Shahid
1984 Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921
22. In Subaltern Studies, III. Ranajit Guha, ed. Pp. 288348. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Perry
1974 Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books.
Appadurai, Arjun
1990 Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Political Economy.
Public Culture 2(2):124.
Aston, T. H., and C. H. E. Philpin, eds.
1987 The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bardhan, Pranab K.
1984 Land, Labor, and Rural Poverty: Essays in Development Economics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bardhan, Pranab K., and Ashok Rudra
1980 Types of Labour Attachment in Agriculture: Results of a
Survey in West Bengal, 1979. Economic and Political Weekly
15(35): 14771484.
1981 Terms and Conditions of Labour Contracts in Agriculture:
Results of a Survey in West Bengal, 1979. Oxford Bulletin of
Economics and Statistics 43(1):89111.
Barthes, Roland
1972 Mythologies. Annette Lavers, trans. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Benjamin, Walter
1969 Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Hannah Arendt, ed.
Harry Zohn, trans. New York: Schocken.
Bernstein, Henry
1973 Underdevelopment and Development: The Third World Today. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Bhabha, Homi K.
1984 Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October 28(102):125133.
1994 The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Braverman, Harry
1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Brenner, Robert
1976 Agrarian Class Structures and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe. Past and Present 70:3075.
1977 The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism. New Left Review I/104:2592.
Burawoy, Michael
1982 Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process
under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds.
1991 The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

589

American Ethnologist

Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto

1979 Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh
1989 Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 18901940.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha
2007 The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus: Nationalist Thought and
the Colonial World, the Nation and Its Fragments, a Possible
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, G. A.
1978 Karl Marxs Theory of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dobb, Maurice
1946 Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Douglas, Mary
1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Elster, Jon
1985 Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds.
1985 Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foster-Carter, Aidan
1978 The Modes of Production Controversy. New Left Review
107:4777.
Foucault, Michel
1970 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.
1973 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon Books.
1978 The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Pantheon Books.
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
19721977. Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Vintage.
Frank, Andre Gunder
1979 Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Gilroy, Paul
1987 There Aint No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics
of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson.
Ginzburg, Carlo
1962 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller. New York: Penguin.
Godelier, Maurice
1973 Rationality and Irrationality in Economics. New York:
Monthly Review.
Gramsci, Antonio
1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. New York: International.
Guha, Ranajit
1983 Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Gupta, Akhil
1984a Revolution in Telengana 19461951 (Part One). Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 4(1):126.
1984b Revolution in Telengana 19461951 (Part Two). Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 4(2):22
32.
1995 Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist
22(2):375402.

590

Habermas, Jurgen
1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge:
Polity.
Hall, Stuart
1985 Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the
Post-Structuralist Debates. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2(2):91114.
Handelman, Don
1978 Introduction: A Recognition of Bureaucracy. In Bureaucracy and World View: Studies in the Logic of Official Interpretation. Don Handelman and Elliott Leyton, eds. Pp. 114.
St. Johns, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic
Research.
1981 Introduction: The Idea of Bureaucratic Organization. Social
Analysis 9:523.
Harvey, David
1991 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herzfeld, Michael
1992 The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
hooks, bell
1984 Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press.
Horkheimer, Max
1975 Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Matthew J. OConnell,
trans. New York: Continuum.
Jameson, Fredric
1992 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta
1989 Bankimchandra and the Making of Nationalist Consciousness. Calcutta: Center for Studies in Social Sciences.
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy
1976 The Peasants of Languedoc. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Lorde, Audre
1984 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press.
Mandel, Ernest
1975 Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books.
Martin, Emily
1987 The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Rev. edition. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, Karl
1964 The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New
York: International.
1967 The German Ideology. New York: International.
Mbembe, Achille
1992 The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the
Postcolony. Public Culture 4(2):130.
Meillassoux, Claude
1981 Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic
Community. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Miliband, Ralph
1969 The State in Capitalist Society. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Minh-ha, Trinh
1989 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy
1988 Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A conversation with Akhil Gupta

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade

1984 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses. Boundary 2 12(3)13(1):333358.
Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds.
1981 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color. London: Persephone Press.
Nugent, David
1994 Building the State, Making the Nation: The Bases and Limits
of State Centralization in Modern Peru. American Anthropologist 96(2):333369.
Ollman, Bertell
1977 Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poulantzas, Nicos
1973 Political Power and Social Classes. London: New Left Books.
Radway, Janice A.
1984 Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rodney, Walter
1972 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: BogleLOuverture.
Roemer, John E.
1978a Differentially Exploited Labor: A Marxian Value Theory of
Discrimination. Review of Radical Political Economy 10(2):43
53.
1978b Marxian Models of Reproduction and Accumulation.
Cambridge Journal of Economics 2(1):3753.
1989 Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Said, Edward W.
1979 Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Scheiner, Irwin
1970 Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta, eds.
2006 The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Spivak, Gayatri
1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds. Pp.
271313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

American Ethnologist

Sweezy, Paul
1942 The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Taussig, Michael
1991 The Nervous System. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Charles
1977 Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Terray, Emmanuel
1972 Marxism and Primitive Societies: Two Studies. Mary Klopper, trans. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Thompson, E. P.
1966 The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage.
Wallerstein, Immanuel
1974 The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.
Williams, Raymond
1978 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Akhil Gupta
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095
akgupta@ucla.edu
David Nugent
Department of Anthropology
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
david.nugent@emory.edu
Shreyas Sreenath
Department of Anthropology
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
shreyas.sreenath@emory.edu

591