Maddening States

In: Annual review of anthropology, Band 32, Heft 1, S. 393-410

Abstract

▪ Abstract  Despite transformations in the character of the state in an age of globalization, news of its demise is certainly exaggerated. Even as operations of state (or state-like) power exceed the boundaries of the nation-state to be deployed by actors such as transnational nongovernmental organizations, private corporations, guerrilla groups, or narcotraffickers, the state form shows remarkable tenacity and adaptability. Invested with a kind of meta-capital, the state remains a crucial presence, a screen for political desires and identifications as well as fears. This review addresses recent academic reflection on the field of knowledge we call the state. It asks how the state becomes a social subject in everyday life, examining the subjective experience of state power and tracing its effects on territories, populations, and bodies. Finally, it considers the ways violence, sexuality, and desire work in the intimate spaces of state power.Begoña Aretxaga's essay was left among her papers in an almost complete form at the time of her untimely death. A collective, consisting of James Brow, Charles Hale, Yael Navaro-Yahsin, Geeta Patel, Brandt Peterson, and Pauline Strong, worked to fill in citations, answer questions Begoña posed to herself, which were unresolved, and to lightly edit the final form of this essay. This piece has not been changed substantially. In an effort to keep to the form and spirit of Begoña's interrogations the essay stands as it was, without a literal conclusion. Perhaps a conclusion can be supplied by readers engaged in an ongoing analysis of contemporary political situations, to which Begoña's work speaks profoundly, as a legacy that this essay and her extended oeuvre bequeathed to us.