Contesting the State: The Dynamics of Resistance and Control - Softcover

Angela Hobart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907774351 ISBN 13: 9781907774355

Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Angela Hobart (Editor and Contributor) is Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland, and a Research Fellow, Medical Anthropology Department, University College London, UK. Bruce Kapferer (Editor and Contributor) is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Norway, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University, Australia and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK. Contributors to this book are: Hosham Dawod (Institut Français du Proche-Orient & Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), T.M.S. Evens (University of North Carolina), Jonathan Friedman(l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales & University of California), Laurie Kain Hart (Haverford College), Joanna Overing (University of St Andrews), Bal Gopal Shrestha (University of Oxford), Christopher Taylor (Independant scholar), Roshan de SilvaWijeyeratne (Griffith University).

Edition details

• Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1907774351
• ISBN 13: 9781907774355
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308
• Editor: Angela Hobart