STATES OF IMAGINATION Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
Edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steppu...
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STATES OF IMAGINATION Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
Edited by Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat
Duke University Press
Durham and London 2001
® 2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free p a p e r © Typeset in Quadraat by G&S Typesetters, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
CONTENTS
Preface
vii
Introduction: States oflmagination i Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat I STATE AND GOVERNANCE "Demonic Societies": Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty Mitchell Dean Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India 65 ~T*r+\>\\/\ u\ ftUfni/ Akhil Gupta The Battlefield and the Prize: ANC's Bid to Reform the South African State 97 Steffen Jensen Imagining the State as a Space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador 123 Sarah A. RadclifFe II STATE AND JUSTICE The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation' 149. Lars Buur
41
jy&\
Reconstructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory: The Work of the TRC 182 Alerta J. Norval Rethinking Citizenship: Reforming the Law in Postwar Guatemala Rachel Sieder Governance and State Mythologies \n Mumbai Thomas Blom Hansen III
203
221
STATE AND COMMUNITY
Before History and Prior to Politics: Time, Space, and Territory in the Modern Peruvian Nation-State 257 David Nugent Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala 284 Finn Stepputat In the Name of the State? Schools and Teachers in an Andean Province Fiona Wilson The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan 345 Oskar Verkaaik Public Secrets, Conscious Amnesia, and the Celebration of Autonomy for Ladakh 365 Martijn van Beek Bibliography
391
About the Contributors Index
vi
417
CONTENTS
415
313
PREFACE
The ideas that led to the conception of this volume grew out of the intellectual environment of the research program Livelihood, Identity and Organization in Situations of Instability, which materialized thanks to the Danish Council for Development Research, the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen, Institute of Anthropology at Copenhagen University, and International Development Studies at Roskilde University. The LIVELY program brought together researchers from a variety of academic fields in an effort to synthesize ongoing theoretical and empirical work on violent conflict, migration, and popular culture. Because these subjects converged on the culture of states yet challenged the idea of the state as something given and immobile, we conceived the idea of an international seminar on the States of Imagination in the postcolonial world and invited a number of prominent and talented scholars for the event. The idea of States of Imagination was enthusiastically received, and the seminar, which took place in Copenhagen in the midst of winter 1998, elicited a collection of fascinating papers, most of which appear in this volume. We are grateful to the participants of this seminar for contributing to an intellectually stimulating seminar and for challenging and refining the common approach that now emerges from the volume. We would also like to express our appreciation of the support and inspiration we have received from our colleagues in the LIVELY program: Karen Fog Olwig, Bodil Folke Frederiksen, Preben Kaarsholm, Henrik Rtfnsbo, Ninna Nyberg S0rensen, and Fiona Wilson, as well as Peter Gibbon, Poul Engberg-Pedersen, Jan Ifversen, Karuti
Kanyinga, Thandika Mkandawire, Afonso Moreira, Kirs ten Westergaard, and other good colleagues. Finally, we would like to thank our secretary, Annette Smedegaard Christiansen, for working hard with us throughout these years, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press for their encouraging and constructive suggestions, which have improved the final product.
viu
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
States of Imagination
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat
. . . as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.—Thomas Hobbes, Ltviathan The state has once again emerged as a central concern in the social sciences. It has also been rediscovered by practitioners of development and powerful international agencies such as the WorjdBank (1997), which now advocates "good governance" by lean and effective structures of government. However, in the vocabulary of World Bank economists the state and its institutions remain strangely ahistorical entities, a set of functional imperatives of regulation arising from society but devoid of distinct characters and different historical trajectories. In this influential train of thought the state is always the same, a universal function of governance. In the 1970s, theories of the capitalist state also privileged the state's functions in reproducing labor and conditions for accumulation of capital over its forms and historicity. Also, when Evans, Ruschemeyer, and Skocpol (1985) "brought the state back in" as an actor in its own right, their conceptualization of state revolved around certain assumed core functions and historical tasks that every state presumably had to perform. The current rethinking of the state occurs at a juncture where the very notion of the state as a regulator of social life and a locus of territorial sovereignty and cultural legitimacy is facing unprecedented challenges. Ethnic mobilization, separatist movements, globalization of capital and trade, and
intensified movement of people as migrants and refugees all tend to undermine the sovereignty of state power, especially in the postcolonial world. The equations among stare, economy, society, and nation thar constituted the dominant idea of stateness in the twentieth century have been undermined from below by growing demands for decentralization and autonomy, and from above by the imperatives of supranational coordination of monetary, environmental, and military policies in new configurations after the cold war. At the same time, the discourse of rights and the proliferating demands for a variety of entitlements have expanded and transformed the meanings of citizenship. The paradox seems to be that while the authority of the state is constantly questioned and functionally undermined, there are growing pressures on states to confer full-fledged rights and entitlements on ever more citizens, to confer recognition and visibility on ever more institutions, movements, or organizations, and a growing demand on states from the so-called international community to address development problems effectively and to promote a "human rights culture," as the latest buzzword goes. This paradox has to do with the persistence of the imagination of the state as an embodiment of sovereignty condensed in the covenant, as Hobbes saw it; as the representation of the volonte generak producing citizens as well as subjects; as a source of social order and stability; and as an agency capable of creating a definite and authorized nation-space materialized in boundaries, infrastructure, monuments, and authoritative institutions. This myth of the state seems to persist in the face of everyday experiences of the often profoundly violent and ineffective practices of government or outright collapse of states. It persists because the state, ojrinsjinnipjjaj^ remains pivotal in our very imagination of what a society is. Whether we agree on what the state means or not, "it" is, nonetheless, central to all that is not state: civil society, NGOS, the notion of a national economy, the market, and the sense of an international community. This paradox of inadequacy and indispensability has robbed the state of its naturalness and has enabled scholars from many disciplines to study stateness as a historical and contingent construction. Following Philip Abrams's (1988) important unpacking of the state in theoretical terms and Corrigan and Saver's (1985) work on the state in Britain, a growing body of work has begun to chart historical trajectories of state formation in various parts of the world. Much of this work has been inspired by Gramscian notions of class power articulated through always fragile and contested hegemonies, as
I INTRODUCTION
well as Foucauldian notions of governance through knowledge-practices and different govern men talkies, that is, the forms of mentality suffusing techniques of gouvanement have informed other careful empirical studies of government and stateness. Among these, the works of Timothy Mitchell on Egypt (1988) and Partha Chatterjee on India (e.g., 1993) have gained wide currency within anthropology. The contributions in this volume all share this denaturalizing approach to state and governance in the postcolonial world; they all study the stare, politics, and notions of authority empirically from a variety of ethnographic sites; and they all position themselves in the space between a Gramscian and a Foucauldian position on power, government, and authority where much of the reconceptualization of the state has been taking place. This is, however, a field fraught with tension and contradictions. In Gramsci's understanding, state power emerged from the capacities, the will, and the resources of classes, or segments thereof. This "will to class power" gave birth to projects of political-cultural hegemony and strategies of social transformation aiming at the consolidation of class domination. Gramsci did not merely see the state as an executive of the bourgeoisie, as older Marxist theories had held, but maintained the foundational role of class power becoming realized in the ' form of a state: "The historical unity of the ruling classes is realized in the State and their history is essentially the history of States . . . the subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a 'State'" (Gramsci 1971: 52). Gramsci tried in other words to denaturalize the state by pointing to its essentially political, and therefore unstable, partial and always violent character. This line was also taken by subsequent Marxist and post-Marxist scholarship inspired by Althusser and Poulantzas, wherein the state remained thoroughly "socialized" and epiphenomenal, that is, an expression of social relations and ideological configurations and, hence, less interesting as a phenomenon in its own right. Also, a range of attempts in the 1980s to create a "state-centered" approach to the relationship between state and society failed to escape a simplistic dichotomy between "state" and "society." In most of these writings the state remained, somewhat paradoxically, a rather unexplored but unified "social actor" along with other ubiquitous and abstract social forces whose internal relationship, as in Marxist scholarship, determined the shape and functions of institutions and directions of policies (e.g., Evans et al. 1985; Migdal 1988).
INTRODUCTION
Even in Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) influential poststructuralist rethinking of hegemony and politics beyond social determinism, the question of the state remained submerged in a wider category of uthe political," now liberated from the straitjacket of essentialist thinking but also far removed from empirical categories. In this perspective, the state, or just institutions, remain entirely political, that is, alterable andfloating,and only appear as relatively stable "nodal points" in discursive formations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:11213) or as relatively routinized forms of power that have become "sedimented" and stable as their political origins have been effaced (Laclau 1990: 34-35). Foucault found issues of legitimacy and sovereignty less relevant Instead he explored how modernity was marked by the emergence of a broader field of government of conduct—of the self, of the family, of institutions, of the body, and so on. Foucault famously remarked, "We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory it still needs to be done" (1980: 121). In Foucault's view, the intensified regulation of modern societies was not a result of the penetration of the state as a center of power, but the other way around: the modern state was an ensemble of institutional forms made possible because of the general "governmentalization" of societies, that is, the specific ways human practices became objects of knowledge, regulation, and discipline. In this view, the modern state is not the source of power but the effect of a wider range of dispersed forms of disciplinary power that allow "the state" to appear as a structure that stands apart from, and above, society (Mitchell 1999: 89). As has been remarked by many of Foucault's interpreters, one finds little interest in the state or in politics in Foucault's writings (see, e.g., Hindess 1996: 96-158; Ransom 1997:101-53). Although frequendy invoked in studies of resistance, Foucault had very little to say about resistance as such beyond mere reactions to new strategies of power, a kind of ubiquitous inertia he at one point likened to chemical processes (1982: 209). Instead, his interest was rather consistently in the conditions of possibilities of politics: how certain disciplinary forms, certain styles of knowledge and governmentalities made specific policies plausible, specific forms of rationality thinkable, and forms of political discourse possible and intelligible.1 Can these stances, harboring such different epistemological strategies, be reconciled? The answer is that they obviously cannot be reconciled completely, but also that they may not need to be. Our argument is that keeping these two perspectives in a productive tension with one another affords a
4
INTRODUCTION
somewhat broader perspective on the ambiguities of the state: as both illusory as well as a set of concrete institutions; as both distant and impersonal ideas as well as localized and personified institutions; as both violent and destructive as well as benevolent and productive. Modern forms of state are in a continuous process of construction, and this construction takes place through invocation of a bundle of widespread and globalized registers of governance and authority, or, as we prefer to call it, "languages of stateness." The central proposition of this volume js_thaf thf ^"dy of t-hp tntp ind it