Making ‘The State’ feasible
A bit ago I posted an entry on “traction and feasibility”:http://savageminds.org/2006/08/28/traction-and-feasibility/ and was about to do a follow up when I got distracted by crispiness and Latour. But there was a circle I was going to close there and so I thought I’d do it now.
Describing how ‘the Ipili’ became feasible requires an understanding of the way in which a particular individual comes to represent a collectivity. This means doing things like examining how the idea of the group is deployed in different circumstances, ethnogenesis, invention of tradition, politics of representation in both the epistemological and political sense, yadda yadda yadda. We — or at least I and my homies — are all very used to the idea of examining all the clockwork behind the seamless appearence of “ethnic group X”. The achieved nature of ‘the Ipili’ is easy for us to see because we are all used to the idea of ethnogenesis and the complex nature of the recognition of indigenous peoples and their representation by one group or another. But clearly this same account of feasibility could be made of any representative of any big actor. We could think of the state in these terms, for instance. How does ‘the state’ come to appear as a taken-for granted entity?
The reason that I mention all this is its relation to my earlier entry on “spatliazing states”:http://savageminds.org/2006/08/24/spatializing-states/. The potential problem with Ferguson and Gupta’s approach, it seemed to me, was the way it conflated the metaphorical space people used to imagine the state, the use of these metaphors amongst people to organize themselves as representatives of ‘the state’, and finally the analysts judgment about the success of these metaphors to structure actions such that ‘The State’ as an achievement might be said to be controlling a sector of space (for instance, a country or a city) at any particular moment of time. Another way of saying this is that these sorts of analyses of ‘The States’ relationship with indigenous people are _asymmetric_ in that the work that goes into examining how ‘the local’ or ‘the indigenous’ or ‘the grassroots’ or whoever is intimately analyzed while the achievement of becoming ‘The State’ or ‘The Global’ is taken for granted.
Perhaps I am picking unfairly on Gupta and Ferguson here, since it is a little unclear what exactly they intend to do — on the one hand they want to thematize a previously taken-for-granted ‘governmentality’ (again, the sexy language is an issue here). On the other hand they seem to use ‘the State’ as an unproblematically existing actor in their narratives. A better target is James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State” which attributes the faculty of vision to an entity which, strictly speaking, lacks eyes. Although the complex processes by which local people are ‘made legible’ is demonstrated, the process by which ‘The State’ itself is made a feasible actor (there’s the word from the previous entry — feasible) is rarely touched on. We have no account of the middlemen who make up ‘the State’.
(Of course given Scott’s left-populism ‘the locals’ get a bit romanticized as well. This is why Scott is wrong in thinking his approach is Foucaultian — he imagines the vision of the state failing (or succeeding) to capture the rich organic texture of life ‘on the ground’ as if it were something which could be accurately discerned, while Foucault insists that the gaze is productive and elicits certain forms of subjectivies rather than identifying preexisting ones.)
If we followed Maia and Latour’s advice and attempted to understand the interaction of local/global forces symmetrically, we’d get a very different way of looking at these issues — one which is, for me anyway, more satisfying in the way that it takes the top off of black boxes with names like ‘The State’ or ‘Global Capital’. A Neoliberalism-Social Studies of Science mashup also has one more feature (if you move on it quickly enough!) — it’s disgustingly sexy and would doubtless help in the quest for tenure!
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org
I never got that Scott imagined the State as perceiving only what was already there but that, like Foucault, he saw the act of “seeing” as a constitutive one. After all, it’s not that hte people just naturally fall into legibility, the State has to make its subjects legible.
That said, I think you’re right to highlight the blank space between individual actors and “the State”, which must necessarily be composed of individual actors yet stands in the literature as Something More Than That.
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Of course, creating representations of states of affairs is a ‘constituting act’ insofar as you are making those representations (document, reports, etc.). But if those representations can _mis_recognize those affairs — and the fact that they routinely do is central to Scott’s whole argument — then what Scott is talking about is identification (which is capable of being inaccurate) rather than elicitation.
Of course, Scott would argue that in some sense The State (whoever they are) ‘shapes’ its subjects by massacring them, collectivizing their farms and villagizing their villages etc. etc. But this second possible sense of ‘constituting’ is clearly quite different from Foucault’s argument, imho.
I personally consider Scott’s more ‘cultural’ work pretty consistently poor — most of it begins with an acknowledgements section in which he discusses how many people attempted to convince him not to write the book! However the moral high ground he occupieis in anthropology’s populist, leftist imagination makes him impregnable to criticism.
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There is a large body of work on “state formation” – my own thesis spent a lot (too much by some accounts) of time trying to understand how states are formed and what that means for identity formation. My foil in this regard is Bourdieu (and to some degree Habermas), against whom I draw upon Gramsci’s work. Gramsci thought very seriously about the nature of state formation as a process and the differences in power relations between various kinds of states. A historian who has tried to expand this work on a global scale is Peter Gran whose book “Beyond Eurocentrism” I recommend to everyone who is intellectually curious. I add that qualifier since Gran’s approach is a too schematic for most people (myself included), but I think he does offer us an example of how we might go about investigating this problem. For a more classic anthropological account of how identity and state formation are linked together, one of my favorite books is:
Gailey, Christine Ward. Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987.
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Thanks for this Kerim. The other area where people have talked about ‘state formation’ is, of course, archaeology. I’m currently working through some of the stuff on the origins of the state and ‘social complexity’ to try put our present moment in comparative perspective.
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Yeah, one of my archeology professors was Thomas “state formation” Patterson.
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Since one sine qua non of making the state feasible is effective military power and the relation of anthropology to military-industrial state apparatus is a much debated topic these days, I offer the following pointer (not an endorsement) to an interesting reflection on the state of strategic thinking and military education these days.
The above is a nearly concluding remark from a long, rambling, complex but
immensely productive essay found at the
Hoover Institution website, following a link from Arts & Letters Daily.
Please put aside the instant prejudice aroused by “Hoover Institution” and
take a look. Lots of immensely debatable but also challenging material
here.
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I disagree — and you see this is the rub. Military power is NOT effective at making the state feasible. Effective military power is an effect, not a cause, of state feasibility. Believing that there is a chain of command, that it is your duty to serve in a citizen army, or that you will be paid by someone (if you are in a PMF) all rely on the idea that there is such a thing as a macro-organization that you are a part of.
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Can you name any states without armies? Mao Tse-tung and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes recognized the importance of military power in closing the loop, a necessary if not sufficient condition of state-building. Not to mention, of course, Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc.
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Iceland.
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I think I agree with Rex that “effective military power” is not required to make a state feasible. On the other hand a “macro-organization” is not the same thing as a “State”. In fact, a military is a kind of “macro-organization” itself, and a military can exist outside the direct control of any state (ie rebellion armies etc). So, I don’t really agree that an effective military is an effect of the State (even if not a cause either). Plus, I think the concept of a “military” really predates the concept of a “State”, in the modern sense.
Also, the Iceland example is misleading, being a memeber of NATO and all. Can you name a state that does not rely on the threat of violence to legitimate its existence? Like David Graeber’s image… we like to think that we don’t live under that threat, but try to access the stacks at the library without showing the proper identification, and a man with a stick will come and hit you ;)
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John, if armies are the EFFECT of states as I suggest, then I’m not sure how the relative absence of army-less states somehow works against my point. And somehow equating the very different political, economic, and military systems that Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Alexander lived within pretty much reduces social science to the level of the game Civilization. Honestly.
Maniaku is right — there are lots of types of macro-actors other than states, and there are lots of ways to impose a macro-actor’s ‘will’ (however we figure out what that is) than a standing citizen army. And of course there is a complex interrelationship between between ‘legitimacy’ (which is what we’re talking about, in some sense) and the organized use of force.
But there are lots of states with ineffective militaries or even fear for the threat an organized military poses to the people who claim to speak in the name of the state — Papua New Guinea being a classic example. The inability of ‘corrupt’ or ‘weak’ states to form effective militaries — or to be unseated by a strong military which does not consider its rules legitimate — is an example of exactly the phenomenon I’m talking about: the failure of a network of actors to put the ontological existence and legitimacy of ‘the state’ into, as the scienc studies people would say, a ‘black box’.
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Tuvalu?
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Or the Vatican?
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Actually, the list of states without miliaries goes on: The Cayman Islands, Andorra, Kiribati, Bermuda, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Dominica, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, French Guyana, French Polynesia, Palestine (is that a state?), Grenada, Guadaloupe, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritius, Mauritania, Montserrat, Naura, Netherlands Antilles, Niue, Palau, Santa Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines (no army, but plenty of Top 40 hits!), Samoa, San Marino, and the Solomon Islands. Most (but not all) of these states have state police forces, which might be a more defining characteristic of states: not so much the existence of a military to legitimate their existence vis-a-vis foreign powers but the existence of a police force to impose the power of the state on its citizenry (which is, however, the opposite of legitimacy).
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Rex: Did you side-step the point Maniaku makes here about force and feasability? M asks: “Can you name a state that does not rely on the threat of violence to legitimate its existence?” This is the question I am asking about your comments on scale with regard to West &/or Tsing — can you let us know given what you’ve said here how you see ‘force’ as being an aspect of feasability?
I guess also I would just add, apropos M’s comment about NATO, that the global order of nation-states, sovereign, self-determined, etc. (as enshrined in the macro-organization the United Nations) was very much elicited through the threat of force/military power. The long list of states without militaries does not obviate this question.
Can you theorize the state today, or government, without an integral or systematic appraisal of relations of force or violence?
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I didn’t side-step Maniaku’s point about force and feasibility (I don’t think). The use of violence (or the threat of it) is often used as a means for states to secure their national interest. But the deployment of forces, the planning and execution of operations, and the underlying command and control structures which this require have as a condition of possibility the presumption of there being a collective subject in whose nname the military acts.
So I’d reverse the question actually — organized force and violence realy are dependent on soldiers’ notion that there is some pre-existing collective subject that they are ‘part of’.
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