Reviews in Anthropology, 41:154172, 2012

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2012.703113

The State Idea in Theory and Practice

CAROL J. GREENHOUSE
Chabal, Patrick, and Jean-Pascal Daloz. 2006. Culture Troubles: Politics and the
Interpretation of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ji, Fengyuan. 2003. Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Maos China.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kirch, Patrick Vinton. 2010. How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise
of Archaic States in Ancient Hawaii. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Skidmore, Monique. 2004. Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociologys

cultural turntaking up the state idea as situated meaning.
The works reviewed here pursue the states idea of itselfin two
cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences
of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of
elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these
points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of
political subjectivity.
KEYWORDS comparative politics, historical ethnography, policing,
states, totalitarianism

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.

LINGUISTIC ENGINEERING (JI FENGYUAN)

Ji Fengyuans Linguistic Engineering presents an analysis of Mao Zedongs
politicization of language and its social effects in the period around Chinas

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Cultural Revolution, i.e., mainly 19661976. It is also an analysis of the

Cultural Revolution itself. Among the primary sources for the book are Jis
interviews with individuals who experienced the Cultural Revolution in
critical locations, as well as her own memories. Ji was a student when the
Cultural Revolution was at its height, and while her moments of first-person
narratives are few and brief, they add to the sense of the work as
experience-near. The books references lead into several literatures: debates
over the significance of the Cultural Revolution as political strategy, memoirs
and other published accounts of the period, and works on sociolinguistics
and cognition (not limited to China). The book is highly readable. Indeed,
Jis focus on studentsmade by Mao into the principal agents of the Cultural
Revolutionmight well make this book especially gripping reading for
undergraduates. They will rapidly find themselves face to face with peers
who, willingly or not, broke with parents, siblings, and age-mates to bring
flesh to his words.
Jis book is in four parts. Part I is a prelude in two chaptersone on
linguistic engineering as a theoretical problem, and the other on linguistic
engineering in China prior to the Cultural Revolution. The phrase linguistic
engineering is Jis ownand these opening chapters make its ironies clear.
The book opens with allusions to Orwells 1984 and the place of language
in its dark vision. Maos vision, in Jis presentation, was similarly predicated
on a combination of methods calculated to control the public sphere and,
ultimately, to reform thought by attaching state sanctions to prescribed and
proscribed utterances in print and in speech. Ji opens the book with a review
of the flawed premises behind the very notion of language engineering as
conceived by Mao (and Big Brother) by holding them up to the light of current
research in anthropology, linguistics, and psychology.
For Jis purposes, the heart of the matter is that language does not determine thought, but functions complexly in relation to the differentiation and
organization of perceptions, concepts, emotions and grammars of experience.
These issues are relevant to the book as a whole in that they provide the theoretical basis for Jis condemnation of the premises of linguistic engineering
while also acknowledging the potentially profound effects of an engineering
campaign on expression and the forms of political agency associated with the
self (Ji 2004:1617). Maos discourse had already become thoroughly naturalized and was extensively hegemonic prior to 1966, and this facilitated the
developments she examines. Ji is agnostic on the question of how people
experienced the language reforms of 19661968 in their thought-worlds,
except as a diffuse and vivid specter of vulnerability. Ji lets readers know that
she had her own secret world at the time (154155).
The main sections of the book are the historical presentations comprising
parts II and III. In part II, she details the unfolding of Maos language
campaignits political purposes and massive implementation, together with
its caprices and lapses. It is here that Ji analyzes the Cultural Revolution as a

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political tactic (summarized in relation to extant scholarship on pp. 143149).

Her thesis is two-fold:
1. Mao actively mobilized students to undertake the Cultural Revolution so as
regain personal control from an increasingly powerful Communist Party
(144 passim). The Cultural Revolution had wide ranging effects across
the population but it specifically targeted high party officials with the
purpose of dividing and destabilizing the party: and
2. Having set the Cultural Revolution in motion, however, Mao could not
control itand specifically lost control of the interpretive canons that
underwrote his vision of linguistic engineering.
Linguistic engineering failed as a program because the Red Guards
bricoleurs par excellenceapparently could not resist expanding their ideas
about language, reference, and meaning into ever-new mandates for
prosecution, e.g., the symbolism of the color red, or particular words marked
out by their possible allusions. Ultimately, words did not have to be spoken or
written to inculpate individuals; any criminalized word could be inferred from
the negation of its negation. As the poetics of the Cultural Revolution proliferated in ways that are grimly fascinating to read, Mao and his closest allies
became increasingly capricious in their efforts to retain controle.g., setting
traps by changing official meanings overnight (Ji 2003:143).
Ji presents her account of Maos revolutionary strategy (spelled out in
chapter 3) as chart[ing] virgin territorythe first attempt to lay bare the
exegetical principles, contexts of interpretation, and contexts of judgment
that surrounded revolutionary discourse in the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution (143144). In part III, she shows Maos efforts to contain a
Cultural Revolution that he could not control. Ji presents the specificity and
intensity of struggles over representation, interpretation, genre, and translation as Red Guards and rebels, now in ascendanceresisted the new hierarchy (221). In this part of the book, the narrative shifts to the reconstruction
of centralized institutions and the development of the Newborn Things of
the Cultural Revolutionessentially and centrally involving the destruction
of urban intellectual elites as a class. The principal strategy involved sending
urban intellectuals to the countryside for manual labor, putting language and
performing arts under bureaucratic supervision, and restructuring educationa massive social restructuring (227) supported by large-scale programs of propaganda (implemented through local teams) and study,
criticism, and self-criticism (implemented through neighborhood committees and work units) (227). The memorization and recitation of stock phrases
and formulae became major activities, consuming as much as half of a workers day. Ji details the penetration of prescribed phrases into everyday speech,
e.g., rituals of greeting and coloring the meanings of ordinary words, as
people adapted the surfaces of their communications to the new rules. She
also describes the toll on Chinese schools and universities.

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In part IV, titled Assessment, Ji reprises her opening theme regarding

the inevitable limits of any attempt to program thought by policing language.
Here, that theme is sounded again in the form of a swift retrospective of events
following the declared end of the Cultural Revolution in 1979. The contradictions in the discursive shift from revolution to wealth accumulation are
managed politically through spin (315), and urban cultural life once again
flourishes. The class prejudices borne of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath have disappeared (316). Mao has emerged as a symbol of the people
against the Party, particularly among those caught in the straitened competition
for employment (316). The term comrade has faded from popular usage, but
is in circulation again among gays and lesbians, and other new urban communities of identity (317). The book closes on this note, along with Jis affirmation that the attempt to produce revolutionary subjects through language
discipline is now over (317). But this should not be misread as a happy ending. Maos linguistic engineering politicized language as a means of depoliticizing the subject, and to the extent the program was successful, its successes did
not depend on language aloneas this fascinating account makes clear.

KARAOKE FASCISM (MONIQUE SKIDMORE)

Monique Skidmore, a sociocultural anthropologist, presents her book on life
in Rangoon and Mandalay (Myanmar) as an ethnography of fear. Where
Ji looks mainly to the linguistic engineers under Mao, Skidmore takes us to
the streets, teashops, and living rooms where ordinary men and women speak
their minds in whispers, if at all, under the encompassing eye and ear of Burmas military regime. The time frame of her field research was 19961998, a
period marked by mobilizations of pro-democracy activists and intensive
counter-measures on the part of the regime calculated to fracture and silence
dissent. Her chronicle of the events of those days, as Aung San Suu Kyi was
moved in and out of prison and house arrest and her supporters rallied in
front of her gates, makes gripping reading.
The book is an ethnographic paradox, in that it was written about nearly
impossible circumstances of social life, yet through participant-observation.
Skidmore is candid about her own responses both to the vulnerabilities she
shared with her informants as well as her precarious professional situationespecially the intricacies of informed consent. She went to Burma as
a medical and psychological anthropologist interested in responses to sustained stress. Her research activities involved extensive ethnographic interviewing in mental hospitals and medical clinics on such issues as heroin
addiction (rampant among wealthy young men), mental illness, domestic
violence, and the medical aftermath of botched abortions. But in the field,
her subject became fearand managing fear sums up her analysis of the
psychological strategies that Burmese people conceive and enact in order
to survive living under an authoritarian regime (6).

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Skidmore relates fear to a gray area where political motivations are

mired in magic, millenarianism, Buddhist ethics, self-preservation instincts,
and a fierce focus on family safety and mental health. Clarity is the first thing
to go in a conflict situation . . . (67). Her titles reference to karaoke fascism
speaks to her principal findings as to the hollowness of Burmese peoples
complianceveneers of conformity that Burmese people present to each
other and, most especially, to the military regime. While these veneers cover
over enormous wells of suffering and injustice, they have become reality: they
are the experience of public sentiment, collective affect, and modernity as a
voyeuristic and hollow, class-based experience (7).
The book unfolds in ten chapters. The first two set the stage, opening
with a brief historical synopsis of Burmas colonial resistance to the British
and introducing readers to Rangoon today, the epicenter of Burmas internal
political struggles. Here, it becomes clear that the emptiness Burmese have
learned as political art does not preclude questions of agency. Indeed, in
Skidmores analysis, withdrawal is a form of agency; she presents interview
evidence that flying away is a persons choice, a deliberate strategy to
preserve a private space in intolerable circumstances. Skidmore associates this
learned capacity to distance oneself with Buddhist tradition as well as with the
contemporary constraints on public spaces of dissent. As an ethnographer,
Skidmore hears the whispers and truncated telephone conversations,
observes the waves of demonstration and retreat, sees the money and food
left for protesters by people driving by, the taxi drivers who ferry students
back and forth for free, the empty eyes and slack limbs in the state-sponsored
rallies.
The next part of the book evokes terror as a constant condition of life
conveying the performative registers of fear, and exploring related issues of
signification. The pervasiveness of threat and suspicion create a milieu in
which hermeneutic decipherment is a survival strategy from which one can
never rest. Terror replicates itself in the very ambiguity of signs and the mental
activity of decoding them. These chapters are important essays in their own
right, but also as preparation for the next sections on the layered veneers
of city lifemodernity, conformity, and absurdity. Skidmore was in
the field when the Asian financial crisis hit the region, and her portrait of
Rangoons cityscape is bleakhalf-finished skyscrapers, video arcades, plastic kitsch, and muddy streets, ruined by the impact of economic crisis on the
drug trade that is a major source of income for the regime. Heroin addiction is
a high-status plague, particularly among young men. The last of chapter of
this set dwells on surrealism a lens through which to examine anew the
disjunction between the regimes wish symbols of a prosperous Asian tiger
economy and their reality as the unmistakeable residues of an incipient
fascist dream world (123). Surrealism also refers to a sense of everyday distance, and the pervasive sense among ordinary people that the kitsch of mass
culture (123) and the jarring juxtapositions created by the military intrusions

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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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authorial voice combines sharp ethnography and reflective meditation.

Readers in anthropology, social medicine, psychology, politics, and religious
studiesas well as southeast Asian studieswill find much to consider here.

HOW CHIEFS BECAME KINGS (PATRICK VINTON KIRCH)

The central thesis of Patrick Kirchs book is that Hawaii formed a pristine
archaic state prior to contact with the West. Kirch has been conducting field
research on ancient Hawaii for decades, and the book is a capstone statement
of his extensive archaeological and ecological studiesengagingly set in
dialogue with the work of other scholars whose research has contributed to
anthropologys understanding of the culture history of ancient Polynesia
(particularly Marshall Sahlins and Valerio Valeri). The book is highly readable
even for those who are unfamiliar with this body of scholarship or with
archaeology. Kirch defines his terms clearly, offers deft summaries of debates
and their stakes, and provides abundant references without encumbering his
narrative.
Kirchs principal argument is two-fold: first, that ancient Hawaii met the
conditions archaeologists associate with the emergence of archaic states, and
second, that a state did emerge under King Kamehameha prior to the arrival
of Cook. Kirch draws on a complex conception of history and diverse datasets to support his arguments. He takes Hawaiis longue duree back to the
first settlement of the archipelago around AD 900, as seafaring expeditions
from eastern Polynesia set out for the islands, presumably already aware of
their existence and settling on their western shores. The settlers subsequently
formed colonies along the islands farther shores and ventured into their
interior spaces. Contact with ancestral homelands eventually stopped, and
in Kirchs account the islands of Hawaii became their own world for at least
three or four hundred years (86). Although Kirch holds that ideas of kingship
and social organization (among other things) formed part of the cultural legacy colonists brought to Hawaii from Polynesia, Hawaiis subsequent isolation is important to his thesis regarding the development of states as
essentially unique to Hawaii in the Polynesian context (27). He fills in the late
pre-contact period with native histories related as stories, as well as with
academic histories.
Kirchs book unfolds in five main chapters. The first sets the stage by
introducing readers to the idea of archaic states as a concept, and specifically
to Hawaiis transition to the cultural and social forms he associates with
archaic states: centralized administration, distinction between the elite and
the people, monopoly of the means of legitimate violence, and provision
for taxation and other means of drawing resources into the state to underwrite
its key functionsmainly war. Kirch wisely urges caution lest readers look to
these as clear or stable categories (72), but ultimately they serve as crucial

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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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movement, technological change, and changes in settlement patterns.

Settlement of the islands expanded from west to east, and from the eastern
shores into the interiormovement enabled by irrigation systems for aquaculture and, in the interior, the development of dry-land agriculture. The
population expanded to its peak at about AD 1500i.e., about a century after
the end of the epic voyagesand then slowed and declined. Evidence of elite
residences has been found at numerous locations, along with evidence of
constructed roads, walls, and trails. Kirch associates the emergence of elites
with a massive displacement of the prior chief-based kinship system. Kings
now claimed ownership of the land, and evidence of agricultural intensification is associated with smaller land plots, particularly between 1650 and
the contact period. I wondered if ownership claims would necessarily
preclude a lineage (or some other) basis for distributing tenure and usufruct.
Be that as it may, Kirch sums up these transitions by periodizing the
emergence of states in the two centuries following the end of contact with
the rest of Polynesia (2010:174175).
The final chapter addresses the why questions. The opening sections
engage other scholars explanations of Hawaiis pre-contact development
(Irving Goldman, Marshall Sahlins, Robert Hommon, and Timothy Earle)
all of whom Kirch casts as theorists of proximate rather ultimate
causation (190). Kirch advocates combining proximate and ultimate
causationdrawing again on the moolelo for an agentive event history,
and to archaeological evidence for broader dynamics. Both genres of evidence are important to his project, given his dual goal of accounting for
the emergence of Hawaiis indigenous state form and identifying the elements that are potentially generalizable to other systems. He theorizes the
ultimate causation in terms of an intensification of agriculture as triggering
a corresponding expansion in the maximum sustainable populationa shift
of equilibrium that favored the accumulation of the economic base needed
for the emergent state. He does not exclude the possibility that grabs for land
took place in the wake of a population decline, when local control might
have already been in disarray. Or, to pursue one of Kirchs analogies to
Mesoamerica in the Maya Postclassic, local communities may have already
diversified in ways that rendered political authority alien in form (Chase
and Rice 1985; Henderson 1998; more generally, see Spencer and Redmond
2004). This latter possibility would be consistent with Kirchs observations
about trans-island and inter-island movement, as well as with his assessment
that the proximate causation for state formation lay in status rivalries, alliances, and political maneuvering. Taken together, the combination of proximate and ultimate factors offers Kirch the basis for offering Hawaii as a
model system for understanding the emergence of primary archaic states
(217)finding in Hawaiis circumscription, expansion, peer polity interaction, and the materialization of ideology the characteristic features of
other known pristine states in Mesoamerica, China, and elsewhere (218221).

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CULTURE TROUBLES (CHABAL AND DALOZ)

The salience of states to comparative politics lingers as a question at the end of
Kirchs book, and it is the primary theme of Chabal and Dalozs 2006 book.
Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz are political theorists whose previous
work together concerns the political systems of Africa. This volume is a methodological essay, aimed at contributing an interpretive approach to culture to
political theory, particularly in the field of comparative politics. Their objective is to improve the realism of comparative politics and, accordingly, its
relevance to the emergent politics of our own vexing times. The authors principal frame of reference is Geertzs methodological writings, but they also
draw on the writings of other anthropologists, particularly as their discussion
turns to the political cultures of specific countries or regions. But while the
authors identify their book as a plea for methodological eclecticism, it is not
a call for interdisciplinarity as such. They complain (congenially) that anthropologys working concepts of politics and the state are too broad to be of use
to political scientists. Indeed, readers familiar with Geertzs efforts to unpeg
ethnography from its key-to-the-universe hook (Geertz 1973:4) may be
startled to find that what the authors want from anthropology is not knowledge of a communitys way of life but more prosaically, a comprehension
of the cultural matrix within which politics are conducted and power is
exercised (106).
Thus culture is presented more or less as a complex informational
requirement, not as an appeal for a particular methodology or for a particular
conception of politics. This is something of a paradox, given what the authors
saylucidly and at lengthabout the recursive effects of politics and identity
(chapter 4). Another paradox is their dismissal of postmodernism as preoccupied with domination, exalt[ing] difference (40) while elsewhere commenting in depth on cultural difference as a political reality in todays
postmodern world (73, 86, 9293). Still, anthropologists will find here a
compelling account of how the idea of culture can improve political theory,
of the concepts and habits of mind that have forestalled this improvement
within political science, and something of what culture is and isnt from a
theoretical standpoint, as well as an interesting comparative discussion that
concludes the argument with a demonstration.
Thus, the books 11 chapters are grouped around issues of framework
(part I), approach (part II), method (part III), and application (part IV). The
starting point is a robust and compelling critique of grand theory and
the universalist fallacy that stipulates a single, external model of the polity
(45). The key question is the analysts ability to enter different systems of
meaning (45). In the same spirit, the authors are critical of historical parallels across time and space (44) and of the very notion of a unilinear evolution
of political formsin particular the evolution of archaic states (230236; cf.

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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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monopolizing) particular forms of controlof government, population, and

resources. They focus on the challenge of translating the criteria by which
states may be recognized as such into the relevant cultural milieu, primarily
as a matter of commensurating and rationalizing (in the Weberian sense)
symbols of authority.
In the works by Ji and Skidmore, meanwhile, we see sheer excesses of
bureaucratic rationalization, as viewed from the hearth and street. We see
totalitarian regimes at the peak of their powers in terms of the pragmatics
of administration and their effects on individuals subjectivity and social
experience overall: the state of exception and the state idea are well
aligneda terrifying specter. Indeed, in both cases, the regimes are in the process of over-reachingi.e., devising means of policing and disciplining that
will ultimately exceed the capacity of bureaucratic rationality as constituted
in practice. In different ways in these contexts, it is striking that even extensive
totalitarian control cannot guarantee the fulfillment the regimes hegemonic
vision. On this point, Skidmore and Ji evoke the cultural specificity of
oppression, even in its mass forms. In Burma, localized registers of Buddhist
practice anchor the analysis to particular urban spaces and to the space of the
body. And in China, nuance becomes a survival skill. In both contexts, the
material presence of the state in the domains of everyday life pervaded even
the most private spaces of the family, friendships, and partnershipsfusing
intimacy to the risks of denunciation.
None of these books should be mistaken for ethnographies of politics in
the sense of sharing power, access to resources, or participating in the substance of legitimation, representation or accountability. Doing so would mean
missing the ways the structural accounts by Kirch and Chabal=Daloz presuppose the legitimacy of state authority, andin the cases of Ji and Skidmore
missing the extent to which the regimes themselves tactically suspend the distinction between consent and dissent. Thus, to return to the observation at the
top of this section, it is arrestingly interesting to observe the extent to which all
four accounts are (diversely) tethered to a model of the nation state associated
with western Europe. This association varies by case. For Kirch, the emergence of the state is predicated on a displacement of earlier authority structures
embedded in localized kinship orders, and on an appropriation of lineage
lands by the reigning elites at the state level. Chabal and Daloz emphasize
the culturality of legitimacy, authority, and representation, mostly outside of
Europe; however, even in the European context, their analysis of the emergence of states (as for Kirch) sweeps politics into stylistic variants of processes
of centralization, monopolization, and institutionalization. In some ways, Jis
and Skidmores accounts show us what states look like when they actually
look like this definition. In all four cases, the concept of the state inheres primarily in the high-level management of elites strategic interests and in various
tactics for controlling the populace (with violence or otherwise). This makes
all the more provocative the strong (and varied) association of strong states

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167

with modernism in these analysesthe modernism arising mainly from the

genealogy of the separate elements of the state model rather than from specific developmental or evolutionary claims on the part of the authors themselves. In this regard, Chabal and Dalozs book is an angled mirror for
anthropologyshedding light on the books as a set.
Anthropologys current engagements with the state idea have for the
most part come about indirectlylargely from above (e.g., as featuring in
human rights claims; e.g., Clarke 2009; Merry 2006; Riles 2006; Wilson 2011)
or below (as hailed by citizens, social movements, or as a source of policy
effects; Edelman 2001; Fernandes 2010; Fortun 2001; Goldstein 2004; Lukose
2009; Petryna 2002; Ries 1997). New ethnographic concerns with militarization, security, and humanitarianism have also brought states into focus in
novel ways (Aretxaga 2003; Bornstein and Redfield 2011; Fassin and Pandolfi
2010; Ochs 2011; Thiranagama and Kelly 2010). Global migration and border
issues have also highlighted state functions from ethnographic ground (Coutin
2007; DeGenova and Peutz 2010). Current work on discourse, language, and
memory relate state practice to subjectivity in a wide range of locations (e.g.,
Borneman 2011; Greenhouse 2011; Gustafson 2009; Mertz 2007). The works
under review may be read productively alongside current work that focuses
directly on the cultural diversity of political forms (e.g., Vincent 2002). Several
recent special journal issues suggest the on-going interest in the micropolitics
of bureaucratization (Political and Legal Anthropology Review 2011), the
aestheticization of states (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
2011), and the social effects of neoliberalism (American Ethnologist 2008).
Current scholarship raises at least two major issues that are at or beyond
the margins of the works under reviewwhich for the most part predate the
literature cited here. One important vein of work involves the relationship
between states and private sector governance (e.g., multinational corporations, transnational markets, and global finance) (Comaroff and Comaroff
2009; Ho 2009; Kingsbury et al. 2005; Maurer 2005; Riles 2011). These works
illuminate prominent (even predominant) forms of power outside the state,
particularly in relation to global capital. Aspects of these works would be relevant to the books on-going (post-publication) stories. As Jis and Skidmores
books draw to a close, for example, both regimes are looking to the international community for points of entry into global markets. Kirch, too,
includes a strong role for non-state power in relation to the accumulation
of material wealth. The main implication of this body of ethnographic work
might be its challenges to the assumption that states are categorically separate
from non-state forms of power, and necessarily displace them. Current
scholarship cautions against assuming that state power is necessarily stronger
than non-state forms.
Further themes in contemporary political ethnography less explored
but also relevant to these works include new formulations of power that
are less tied to the template built up after Weber. One important vein of

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scholarshipfrom anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists

considers the global south as a pragmatic and theoretical challenge to the
western European state model (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011; Ferguson
2006; Rajagopal 2003; Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). Another takes
up the more subjective dimensions of state power from standpoints of gender,
ambivalence, tradition, and routinization of insecurity (Garces 2010; Johns
2005; Kreide 2009; Orford 1999). These worksas reliant on Michel
Foucault and Giorgio Agamben as they are on Weberchallenge the
conventions of scale that sustain the classic state model (Fitz-Henry 2011;
Valverde 2009). Ostrom (2007) emphasizes polycentricity and common
pool resources as important areas where institutional analysis engages the
specificities of social and cultural experience as something more than context
or variable.
To the extent that it is state government that is relevant to our concerns
here, new ethnographic work is suggestive of where and how state authority
functions (often uneasily) between transnational and domestic interests.
Examples include studies of elections (Coles 2007), documents (Riles 2006),
and other administrative technologies. Ethnographic analyses of the states
of the global north (e.g., Abele`s 2000; Verdery 1996) show how states may
strain to maintain the cultural and material resources necessary to sustain their
own rationality practices.
At stake in the tension between the state model built up after Weber,
the state idea as articulated through the cultural turn, and Agambens inversion of that turn toward the state of exception is (among other things) the
status of democracy as a premise for political ethnography (see Paley 2002;
2008). Nugent (2008) cautions against over-reliance on a generalized normative democracy as a template for politics. The western European state
model is perhaps readily imported into anthropology precisely because it
presupposes participation and consent in democratic termseven though
neither is explicit in the model itself. Significantly in this regard, Ji and Skidmore resist this premise in their apparent refusal to formulate political
agency primarily as active resistance to the state, but rather as the autonomous capacity for reflection and self-knowledge embedded in social relations outside the state. They are trenchantly silent on the question of how
people participate in reforming state power (in their own minds or on the
streets), focusing instead on the extension of the democratic struggles for
equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations (Laclau and Mouffe
1985:xv). The interpretive challenge Kirch sets for himself likewise (but differently) highlights the state as a register of social distance and unsettlement. If we cannot think tyranny without democracy, then we cannot
avoid the mobius strip aspect of the states perfusion within the very concept of the social. This does not cancel out our ability to reconcile the cultural turn to political realism; however, it might mean we cannot do so
from a distance.

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169

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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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