The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside, or marginal to, Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued). The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
Angela Hobart has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and is currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. She is also Honorary Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department, University College, London. She is the author of "Dancing Shadows of Bali "(1987).
Urs Ramseyer studied cultural anthropology, sociology and musicology in Basle and Paris. He is the head of the South-East Asian Department at the Basle Museum of Ethnology. His previous books include "The Art and Culture of Bali "(1977).
Albert Leemann studied at the University of Zurich and the Alliance francaise in Paris. He is Emeritus Professor of Social and Environmental Geography at the University of Zurich.
Bruce Kapferer is professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and honorary professor at University College London. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, "Legends of People, Myths of State."
