Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The 13 chapters in this collection were specially selected from over 400 papers given at the 'Shifting States' conference at the University of Adelaide in Australia in 2017. The papers were selected on the basis of their empirically rich and theoretically engaging contributions to the theme.
The volume comprises an ethnographic examination of state agency and the relationships between surveillance, bureaucracy, infrastructure and personhood, making it relevant across a range of contemporary issues. Part I of the volume, 'Dialectics of Security, Surveillance and Struggle', examines trajectories of state organization and security in the context of late-capitalism and technological saturation. Examples here are taken from Aboriginal Australia and urban North America, and include discussions of militarisation, post-colonial settlements, and the politics of migration. Part II, 'Ethnographies of Infrastructure: Assemblage, Experimentation and Mobilization', presents ethnographies of industrial, energy, and transportation infrastructures, and uses these to think about how such large scale projects not only reflect government aspirations, but engender new realms for state-citizen engagements. Examples here are taken from Latin America, Post-Socialist Europe and South-east Asia, and examines issues of contingency, citizenship, and human security. Part III, 'Sensory States, and their Contingent Citizenries', explores the sensual life of state formations, opening up discussion of the politics of embodiment and affect. Examples here are again drawn from Australia, Europe and the Pacific, and include discussions of public health interventions, bio-medical power more broadly, and the politics of intimate relations. Moving seamlessly from the specific to the nation-wide, the volume develops new theoretical understandings of the state and will be of value for scholars of anthropology, political philosophy and political science.
Synopsis
Shifting States draws on a rich history of anthropological theorising on all kinds of states - from the pre- to the post- industrial - and explores topics as diverse as bureaucracy, infrastructure, surveillance, securitization and public health.
As we enter the third decade of the twentieth-century, there is a growing sense that 'the state' is everywhere in crisis. Although the nature of this perceived crisis varies from place to place, it is everywhere seen to have been caused by some combination of the (inter-related) forces of 'globalisation', of successive economic shocks, and of the rise of social media-fuelled populist movements. Yet conversely, there is also a creeping perception that state power is becoming more pervasive in its reach, and in its effects, in ways which make it ever more imminent to the material worlds in which we live, more fundamental to the ways in which we conceive of the future, and more foundational to our very sense of self. How might we try to make sense of, and to mediate, these apparently contradictory impressions?
Based on ethnographic case studies from all over the world, this timely volume forges new ways of thinking about how state power manifests, and is imagined, and about the effects it has on ordinary people's lives. In so doing, it provides tools not only for understanding states' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also for judging what effects these responses are likely to have.