Dualism and entanglement in anthropological approaches to statehood

This paper grew out of my perception of a tension in much contemporary anthropology between an urge to hold on to notions of ‘difference’, on the one hand, and a long tradition of studying forms of interdependence and entanglement, on the other. Perhaps nowhere is this tension more apparent than in anthropological engagements with the state. To explore this dichotomy, my article interweaves perspectives on globally interrelated histories, where ‘state’ and ‘stateless’ societies have transformed and constituted one another through time, and studies of multiple, intersecting and conflicting power structures that challenge oppositions such as that between state and society.

First, I discuss political anthropology’s old preoccupations with ‘order without government’. Distinctions between traditional and modern political forms have been renewed through interest in ‘stateless societies’. Underpinned by American traditions of mistrust in the state (e.g. Scott, 2009), current anthropological vindications of ‘peripheral societies’ present wider criticisms of the backlash caused by the US ‘war on terror’ and of the sweeping criminalization of Muslim people in regions where colonial regimes have been replaced by (equally oppressive) national governments (Ahmed, 2013).

Nevertheless, revived fascination with the kin-based, egalitarian societies of classical political anthropology is also symptomatic of general fears of losing the discipline’s ‘natural’ object. Some anthropologists call for a reappraisal of the term ‘tribal’, which, seemingly free from derogatory connotations, is employed to celebrate the resistance of peripheral societies to centralized government control (see Nader, 2015: 19). Former critiques of the concept (e.g. Godelier, 1977; Leach, 1986) are put aside as the term ‘tribe’ is resuscitated for its ‘heuristic value’ (Molina et al., 2017), or to refer to newly conceptualized entities capable of adapting to varied circumstances without losing their ‘ethos’ and their characteristic mechanisms for limiting individual power (Rosen, 2016).

Even under these assumptions, it would be simplistic to say that the scholarly imaginings of statelessness discussed here are necessarily underpinned by classical anthropological notions of ‘cultures’ as coherent wholes with their own logics, associated with ‘tradition’ and fundamentally opposed to ‘modernity’ (Crehan, 2002: 45–57). In recent decades, theoretical and empirical scholarship has challenged these notions. For example, a cursory glance at the re-launch issue of Anthropological Theory (Reyna et al., 2016) reveals the complexity and diversity of critiques of the purportedly radical alterity of indigenous peoples, anarchist-oriented views of statelessness, or ‘ontological’ notions of essentially incommensurable ‘difference’. Nonetheless, I argue, some of these assumptions are retained, at least implicitly, in the binary oppositions re-inscribed by specific anthropological debates on stateless societies.

Admittedly, critiquing dualisms, as opposed to ‘real’ social phenomena, may reinstate dichotomies at another level, missing the discursive possibilities and practical effects of different kinds of reification in contexts where they help to articulate a variety of social relations and academic or political agendas (Yarrow, 2008a). Using a variety of approaches, this article discusses the reproduction of several related oppositions and their implications for examining both the complexities of power and scholarship on the state. Besides considering different perspectives on the interdependence and mutual constitution of distinct modes of social organization, I highlight authors who have addressed the relational production of difference itself (Eckert, 2016), as well as practices of classifying human ways of organizing that are implied in the ongoing reproduction of the state/society binary and its associated oppositions (Thelen and Alber, 2018a).

As an example of this coproduction of boundaries, I argue that comparative analyses in international relations (IR)––particularly those locating areas of ‘limited statehood’ in states unable to enforce central decisions––are, in important respects, co-extensive with certain anthropological quests for geographical and cultural spaces beyond the reach of states. In the anthropological approach, culture becomes a fixed form of social organization ascribed to egalitarian, kinship-based societies, whereas in the IR approach, the state is treated as a variable in terms of its territorial reach and functional capacities. In their convergent search for tribal, traditional, or civil ‘substitutes for state governance’, both the limited statehood thesis and some recent anthropological literature on statelessness reproduce the modes of discursive ordering underlying much political theorizing in the USA and Europe.

I am not arguing that all anthropological approaches to statehood carry such baggage. Instead, I focus only on those that resonate with policy prescriptions modelled on the assumed opposition between states and tribal societies and influence public discourse. Such prescriptions imply an epiphenomenal or, at best, a utilitarian conception of difference, as when local codes of behaviour and forms of social organization are seen to provide ‘functional equivalents’ to modern statehood.

Clearly, some normative, statist and anti-statist approaches share a homogenizing ‘idea of the state’, yet images of statehood can be affirmed, altered or even weakened by heterogeneous practices in complex political fields. This insight relates to an alternative concept of culture in which historically informed meaning and interpretation are inextricably entangled with power relations. In the final part of the article, I take up this strand of inquiry through references to anthropological studies that concentrate not only on ‘imagining’ the state, but also on ‘doing the state’ in arenas like those provided by development programmes. These are characterized by a ‘multiplicity’ of norms, since ‘Successive forms of power are piled one upon the other without displacement or substitution taking place’ (Olivier de Sardan, 2005: 16). Centred on the ‘entanglement’ of multiple rationales in heterogeneous arenas, this approach sets aside the presumption of distinct modes of social organization, either operating on different scales or following each other in temporal order. The focus on historical configurations of power is also important to the new holistic approaches for research on social organization, since, in their broadest sense, they are ‘about micro-analyses of the contingent encounter of different logics of action in situations structured by historical figurations’ (Eckert, 2016: 243–244; citing Boltanski, 2014).

The stateless societies of anthropology, past and present

In their introduction to The Anthropology of the State, Sharma and Gupta argue that ‘Both everyday and theoretical imaginings of the state are culturally informed, context-specific and historical’ (2006: 30: note 11). To expand this argument, it should be noted that researchers’ writings are localized not only by their empirical data (Fardon, 1990), but also by their philosophical baggage (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 7). Thus, many contemporary debates on statehood trace to two major traditions in western political philosophy. The experience of the English Civil War influenced the Hobbesian view of the state as a necessary evil to protect citizens against internal discord. Its only alternative seemed to be civil consensus and voluntary association against the state, a tradition that gained global prominence via the American Revolution (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 8). Reflecting this particular historical experience, the pervasive ‘fat government’ construct and aversion to public regulation in the USA provide common ground for both neoliberal policies and anarchist-oriented scholarly accounts of peoples avoiding the predatory reach of the state (e.g. see Scott, 2009).

On the other hand, the development of absolutist regimes into states in continental Europe led to built-in mechanisms of checks and balances combining a monopoly on violence with civil rights concessions. Evolving from Hegelian idealism to more empirical approaches, this specific historical experience and its concomitant (more positive) view of the state were generalized and reflected in Max Weber’s definition of the state in terms of territoriality, monopoly on the use of force and bureaucracy (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 8–14), ideas which cast a long shadow over western academia.

Straddling these philosophical traditions, classical (especially British) political anthropology demonstrated that order is possible without the state (Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Leach, 1954) but still implied that the state is an overarching philosophical concern (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014b: 46). In his Preface to African Political Systems, edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown universalized Weber’s definition of a state-type political community by equating political organization ‘with the maintenance or establishment of social order, within a territorial framework, by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force’ (1940: xiv). Interestingly, this Eurocentric premise seems to discredit the book’s implicit evolutionary dichotomy between kin-based (egalitarian) and territorial (stratified) societies. Stating that all forms of social organization are framed by some sort of territorial structure, Radcliffe-Brown concludes:

To try to distinguish, as Maine and Morgan did, between societies based on kinship (or, more strictly, on lineage) and societies based on occupation of a common territory or locality, and to regard the former as more ‘primitive’ than the latter, leads only to confusion. (1940: xiv)

Despite these insights, anthropological studies of political systems fed into dualisms bequeathed from classical sociological thinking. Interested mostly in ‘traditional’ forms of politics, such studies tried to conceptualize ‘small-scale’ societies within wider contexts. When the modernization of colonial rule accompanied a shift of attention to social change and modern forms of politics––for instance, in the Manchester school––anthropologists ‘studied around the state, at its margins’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014b: 47). Thus, they developed notions of ‘local level politics’, in which state agents are one type of actor among others in village political dynamics (Schwartz, 1968), and ‘local arenas’, where ‘multiplex’ relationships develop between confronting institutions and actors (Gluckman, 1955).

Many classificatory schemas and concepts later adopted by sociology and political science (see Bailey’s work on clientelism, informal leadership and ‘encapsulation’ (1969)) revolved around the articulation between two separate polities represented by ideal-typical opposites of the local/village and the national/state (Shore and Wright, 1997: 13). For Africa, long-standing interest in the relations between changing traditional authorities and modern governments (Gluckman, 1948; Ray and van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, 1996) contributed to a large literature on the state and its ‘tribal peripheries’ that focused on the mutual constitution of state and non-state formations (see Beck, 1989).

More recently, however, the relationship between centre and periphery has been reinterpreted chiefly as a one-way process of annihilation, assimilation or neglect at best. This perspective is central to the work of anthropologist Akbar Ahmed, the Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington, DC. In his book The Thistle and the Drone (2013), Ahmed contends that the US war on terror has become an assault on Islamic tribes, killing innocent people who are lumped together with Islamist terrorist groups because they resist oppressive central governments. Thus, US intervention has exacerbated existing tensions between centres and peripheries in both Muslim and non-Muslim nations across the globe. Ahmed discusses 40 examples of kin-based ‘tribal societies’ and their relations with state authorities, from North Africa and across Western Asia to Indonesia and the Philippines, employing notions of ‘self-governance’ (2013: 195) to highlight alternative systems of dispute resolution based on traditional codes of honour and revenge (2013: 25). In her commendatory on Ahmed’s book, Laura Nader interprets this as a statement of ‘governance without government’ (2015: 20). Drawing on the distinction between the legal-military character of the state and the definition of ‘nations’ in ‘cultural terms’, Nader denounces the fact that ‘Nation resistance to state expansion is now called “terrorism”’. Her conclusion derives from Ahmed’s argument: ‘cruel central government invasions will not work, given the indication that brutal revenge attacks will continue from the periphery’ (Nader, 2015: 20; see also Ahmed, 2013: 5). ¹

There is obviously no question of criticizing anthropological struggles to recognize other social formations as valuable in their own right. If this has not been accomplished, it is due in part to a persistent failure to theorize the production of difference itself (Eckert, 2016: 242). According to Eckert, this essential aspect of anthropological critique entails interrogating given cultural differences, the presumption of which obscures the entanglement of diverse forms of social order (2016: 245). Anthropologists may be in a good position to understand the workings of multiple and intersecting power structures, yet difficulties persist in combining micro and macro levels within a single field of analysis, as is illustrated by some scholars’ convergence on a celebrated ‘resistance’ to domination by large systems of power (Shore and Wright, 1997: 13).

In this light, it is possible to understand some responses to the work of authors like Ahmed, who speaks of a fundamental clash between central governments and tribal peripheries, emphasizing tribal egalitarianism and commitment to freedom. Nader compares Ahmed’s book with political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (2009). Scott focuses on ‘Zomia’, which is ‘a mountainous region in South Asia comprised of parts of Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand with a population of 100 million people’, whose members ‘consciously choose to avoid the reach of the state due to the possibility of being subject to predatory behaviour by states’ (Nader, 2015: 20). On a map, this wide-ranging stateless utopia is represented as Dutch social scientist Van Schendel’s (2002: 653) original Zomia in Southeast Asia with extensions north and west (Michaud, 2010: 188). ²

Accompanying anthropology’s development since the 19th century, the conceptual and geographical opposition between modern statehood and traditional organizational forms based on kinship has been ‘further mapped onto scalar and temporal axes’ (Thelen and Alber, 2018b: 1). This coheres with binary distinctions in other social sciences, and feeds into classifications that continue to influence public discourses in and out of academia. In the next section, I ask whether this coherence limits anthropology’s ability to challenge arguments that political problems outside the West result from the separate histories and differing cultures of homogeneous ethnic communities.

Interdisciplinary convergence in areas of ‘limited statehood’

One key task for anthropology is to appreciate the problematic nature of policies and interventions that ultimately depend on a normative (western) understanding of the state. Take the SFB 700, for example, a collaborative research project funded for the last 12 years by the German Research Foundation and supported by five German academic institutions specializing in international and security affairs. According to the contributors to Governance without a State?, one of the books resulting from this project, ‘Outside the developed OECD world [we] find “areas of limited statehood”, from developing and transition countries to failing and failed states in today’s conflict zones and––historically––in colonial societies’ (Risse, 2011: 2). Like Zomia’s geographic extensions, ‘degrees of limited statehood’ are represented as concentrations on a heat map in Thomas Risse’s introduction to the volume (2011: 7): beyond the white-coloured confines mostly of North America and western Europe, countries take on different shades of grey, ranging from near white to jet black. ³ Here, limited statehood is understood as diminished ‘domestic sovereignty’ and defined as ‘the formal organization of political authority within the state and the ability of public authorities to exercise effective control within the borders of their own polity’ (Krasner, 1999: 4; quoted in Risse, 2011: 4). This conceptualization closely follows Weber’s ‘rather narrow concept of statehood’, for which Risse and the contributors to his edited volume ‘have deliberately opted’ (2011: 4).

The normative typologies of classificatory state analyses have been challenged from the wider fields of comparative politics and international studies (Migdal, 2001), anthropology (Paley, 2002; Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 10–11) and even from international relations (Walker, 1993). The surprising persistence of comparisons using the western liberal state as a benchmark illustrates something about the cultural construction of states in scholarly communities, where context-specific ‘representational frames articulate with structural and functional approaches to studying states’ (Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 6). We recall Walker’s critical reading of theories of international relations ‘as expressions of an historically specific understanding of the character and location of political life in general’, where possibilities for alternative thinking are constrained by a set of opposites––inside and outside, community and anarchy––‘that have been reified so smoothly within claims about state sovereignty and political realism’ (1993: 5, 8).

Alternative institutional arrangements for ‘collapsed’ and ‘failed states’ were proposed by American IR specialist Stephen D. Krasner (2004). Following Krasner’s line of thought, Risse and his collaborators call for abandoning ‘state building’ as part of the ‘governance package’ that the international community arguably deploys in areas of limited statehood (Risse, 2011: 27). Their warnings about the adverse outcomes of ‘applying a Western governance concept’ to such areas resonate with Ahmed and Nader’s prediction of further revenge attacks from the periphery against imposed centralized governments. The solutions envisaged by these anthropologists include looking for what international relations scholars call ‘functional equivalents to developed statehood’ (Schuppert, 2011). Among these equivalents are diverse coalitions of public and private (national and international) actors capable of coordination to provide collectively binding rules that effect the collective good (i.e. ‘governance with government’), as well as ‘rule making by nonstate actors or self-regulation by civil society’ (‘governance without government’) (Börzel and Risse, 2010: 116; Risse, 2011: 9–10). These recipes for ‘sharing sovereignty’ would have us believe in a world regulated by the trickle-down effects of transactions among transnational companies (Schuppert, 2011), which may offer some form of security or engage in environmental self-regulation (Risse, 2011: 21). In war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, some authors even refer to ‘security markets’ where mercenaries hired to protect the facilities of multinational corporations, local warlords and criminal cartels may deem it in their interest to provide security as a public good: they find it more profitable to protect rather than to exploit the local population (Chojnacki and Branovic, 2011).

One problem with the search for functional equivalents to modern statehood is that it implies a reified, decontextualized conception of the state as a rule-making agent whose presence or development can simply be compared over different regions. Thinking in terms of degrees of statehood ignores qualitative differences owing to historical, cultural and geographical dimensions that are central to the structural and functional aspects of states (Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 10). Among these dimensions are commonplace specification and representation processes that create the idea of an institutionalized rule structure separate from society and the economy (Mitchell, 2006: 185)––an understanding of the state shaped by the particular locations of the scholars themselves. Although anthropologists are particularly well placed to challenge the ‘naturalness’ of concepts arising from the specific European historical experience (Gupta, 1995), they, too, may carry some of this baggage with them in their discursive constructions of the state.

I do not disparage the work of scholars who note the arbitrary and disruptive character of borders inherited from European colonization and denounce the stigmatization of those labelled ‘terrorists’ for resisting incorporation into diverse spheres of repressive state intervention––in the wake of the US ‘war on terror’, the analyses of Scott, Ahmed and Nader have become particularly timely. Instead, I highlight the implications of arguments that are often cast as an opposition between the cultural moorings of ‘tribal’ or ‘peripheral’ peoples and a state conceptualized mainly in functional and institutional terms. What is significant about advocates of the limited statehood approach is not only that they mirror anthropological constructions of large systems of power as exterior to local polities; they also concur with anthropologists in regarding the residual freedoms stemming from a local polity as something that can be stabilized by ‘multilevel governance’.

An example of this explanatory framework is found in debates about the Pakistani state: while enjoying ‘a monopoly over the use of force in large parts of its territory, the so-called tribal areas in the country’s north-west are beyond the control of the central government’ (Börzel and Risse, 2010: 119). Waziristan is one of these Federally Administered Tribal Areas: Ahmed––then a Pakistani government agent––once served as its ambassador. In this and other regions in his analysis, the ‘tribal societies under discussion’ are positively characterized by the ‘Love of freedom, egalitarianism, a tribal lineage system defined by common ancestors and clans, a martial tradition, and a highly developed code of honor and revenge’ (Ahmed, 2013: 5). IR scholars do not see such ‘traditional normative structures’ as necessarily negative, since they can provide order without government:

Areas of limited statehood are often populated by traditional communities with their own social standards, even if they do not always fully conform to global standards of human rights, democracy, and good governance. For example,… [transnational] companies may be embedded in local communities defined by clan structures sharing certain standards of appropriate behavior that include the provision of governance. (Börzel and Risse, 2010: 125)

One might attribute the cross-disciplinary convergence of constructions of the state and its ‘tribal peripheries’ to similar social locations and shared cultural traditions. Generally, such consistency illustrates ‘continual reciprocal interaction’ between the powerful, relatively stable meanings acquired by concepts relating to social life and the context in which they first came into being (Crehan, 2002: 39). Recall, for example, the method employed by British structural-functionalist anthropologists to classify African societies according to their distance from a western model of political organization, searching for customs that performed similar functions to those of state institutions: ‘Thus the rudiments of what in the more complex societies is the organized institution of criminal justice are to be found in these recognized procedures’ for sanctioning persons accused of witchcraft (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940: xvii). In the context of current criticisms of the necessity of the state, this argument is used to make a case for ‘order without government’, as when Nader (2015: 19) reminds us that

Africanists Evans-Pritchard and Fortes stated that it is possible to have a stable, enduring political system, working efficiently without the organization known as ‘the state’; … ‘modern political thinkers may discover that there are stabilizers in non-national, multicentred authorities which can solve some of the problems that seem to battle the nationalistic unicentric authority systems of the 20th century’. (Bohannan, 1963: 282; quoted in Nader, 2015: 19)

Eric Wolf (1982) pointed a way out of anthropology’s eternal return to its original preoccupation with non-European ‘otherness’ via analysis of a common past of complex interconnected historical world processes: developments in colonized areas influenced developments in metropolitan societies, while incorporation in the European world economy shaped the way ‘peripheral’ populations interpreted their past. Wolf also provided a perspective for understanding the relationship between the reconfiguration of state power and the development of different kinds of decentred powers, which may cast doubt on the ongoing notion of the market as a substitute for receding state governance. This relationship can be reversed if we consider that privatization of power––which often stimulates political violence––is a consequence of the shift to neoliberal market economics and reduction in the state’s capacity to provide public services (Wolf, 1999: 273). The same goes for assumptions about metropolitan centres facing ‘international destabilization because of conflicts spilling-over from areas of limited statehood’ (Risse, 2011: 26), a political imagery long disproved by the ‘entanglements’ of ‘respectable’ metropolitan businesses with southern plunder and violence (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006: 18). ⁴

These perspectives on interdependence cohere with the ‘new holisms’ currently advocated by anthropologists like Thelen and Alber (2018a), who demonstrate how kinship and ‘the state’ emerge as mutually constitutive through time and space. This ‘holism of historical process’, as Eckert (2016: 246) argues, possibly distinguishes anthropology ‘more than anything else from other social sciences, among them all versions of differentiation theory’ and their implicit teleological hierarchizations of different forms of social order.

Nevertheless, the presumption of a deep-rooted opposition between the modern state and traditional kinship-based societies has been retained in some anthropological debates, which link those modes of social organization to divergent temporalities and scales. With anarchist-oriented imaginings of stateless societies readily becoming the flip side of liberal political science assumptions, the market is replaced by the community or the tribe. This is a safe return to anthropology’s privileged object, away from stratified population centres abandoned by societies who ‘[stripped] down the complexity of social structure in the interest of mobility’ (Scott, 2009: 226). Scott’s thesis aligns with attempts at countering what anthropologists like Sillitoe perceive as a ‘crisis’ in the discipline marked by the blurring of ‘difference’ in research themes and locales––attempts at ‘hanging onto something that “essentially” defines anthropology. It features the crossing of some socio-cultural frontier into a world quite different from our own, taking with us the non-judgemental axiom of cultural relativity’ (Sillitoe, 2007: 151). Thus, the need to ensure anthropological translation underpins further contributions to the boundary work that upholds other deep-rooted dichotomies.

Culture against the state

The notion of ethnic identity as the source of distinctive culture and social organization ignores the fact that ‘humans have been “politically modern” for perhaps 100,000 years’, organizing themselves ‘along intersecting but alternative lines of territory, kinship and associations’ (Jonsson, 2017: 4). Some anthropological approaches to global cultural phenomena suggest that certain developments linked to western modernity can be found in other contexts (Friedman, 1994): even egalitarian peoples can produce mechanisms of coercive power and ‘wield notions that are associated with sovereignty’ (Jonsson, 2017: 4). However, there is danger in assuming that state formation––a historically contingent process––is somehow inherent in the social structures of kin-based communities (Gledhill, 2000: 30).

Thus, some critical perspectives on the emergence and development of coercive power provide important insights that should not be casually dismissed. As Pierre Clastres expressed in his essay, Society Against the State (1977)––a key reference for state relativists––they challenge the ethnocentrism of universalizing the model of political power derived from the modern western state. Jean Michaud (2017: 9) reminds us that Clastres’s work constituted a ‘response to a contemporary undercurrent of French anthropology proposing a strict Marxian analysis of kinship-based social systems (Rey 1975; Terray 1972)’. Talal Asad (1987: 601–603) took up this point in his review of Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (1982) by questioning the usefulness of concepts like ‘kinship-ordered mode of production’ in elucidating the history of non-capitalist societies. Such criticisms may be necessary to avoid evolutionary classifications that leave no room for ‘qualitative differences in the nature and deployment of power in different types of societies, including those of the Western industrialized nations themselves’ (Gledhill, 2000: 13).

Nonetheless, sustaining a strict opposition between state and stateless societies is problematic when we consider the possibility that they have ‘formed interrelated and interdependent parts of a single, dynamic social process on a regional scale’, precisely because ‘pristine’ forms of organization were transformed as ‘tribal’ groups sought to resist the development of centralized power (Gledhill, 2000: 13). This admits the possibility that such groups preserved an important degree of autonomy while adapting to changing situations through, for example, trade with more stratified population centres: Clastres was not really analysing ‘aboriginal survivals’ from an earlier, stateless era (Gledhill, 2000: 30; Scott, 2009: 334). Scott concedes, however, that the situation he described for Southeast Asia no longer applied after the Second World War, since the ‘strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states’ was disrupted by ‘distance-demolishing technologies’ and ‘strategies of “engulfment”’ through which state power was projected on ‘zones of weak or no sovereignty’ (Scott, 2009: xii).

This need not be the case, Michaud (2017: 10) argues, if we think of Zomia as a ‘stance’ or a ‘state of mind’ rather than a place, since ‘culture is a more fundamental element of division’ than topography. In a way that echoes Ahmed’s call to reconstruct traditional forms of society based on tribal lineage systems, Michaud proposes a ‘kinship-based societies argument’ to free Scott’s thesis from its geographical and historical constraints:

Zomians all share a form of social organization based on orality and egalitarianism. The objection mentioned above – that the Zomia space has also, over centuries, given birth to a number of endogenous states and feudal regimes – would not counter Scott’s central claims nearly as powerfully if his thesis was framed around a cultural core instead of a geographical or a historical one. (Michaud, 2017: 9)

Thus, sociocultural differentiation is reinstated through recourse to time-honoured anthropological concepts like ‘culture cores’, this time to make a case for analysing those said to avoid the reach of the state. Michaud’s sympathetic critique of Scott’s limitations draws on constructions of culture as something opposed to the state, referring to egalitarian, kinship-based societies that manage to preserve their Geist even as members migrate to other countries. It also restores the non-western ‘others’ whose virtues are celebrated ‘to a safe temporal difference and a different global system, effacing “the questions of history and power on both poles of the contrast”’ (Gledhill, 2000: 241; quoting Di Leonardo, 1998: 61). ⁵

The imaginings of stateless societies examined above are not entirely free from the questions Gledhill raises in relation to Clastres’s work. Exclusive emphasis on centralized government coercion focuses attention away from other modalities of domination like, for example, those manifest in inequalities between men and women (Gledhill, 2000: 26–27, 30). In fact, inequalities based on age and gender suggest that kinship and marriage should also be seen as political phenomena other than ‘resistance’ to the state. Anthropology’s long tradition of studying politics within religion, gender and kinship may lead us to recognize how the processes of state institutions are also based on them (Thelen and Alber, 2018a; Wolf, 1966). Thus, the state can be conceptualized ‘within (and not automatically distinct from) other institutional forms through which social relations are lived, such as the family, civil society, and the economy’ (Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 9; original emphasis). If the boundary between the state and those other forms is itself an effect of power (Mitchell, 2006), then analysis of state formation processes––including resistance and contestation––can focus on how ‘the state’ comes to assume its separate position in both every day and scholarly imaginings. According to Mitchell (2006: 185), ‘the essence of modern politics’ is ‘the producing and reproducing of these lines of difference’ and the binary oppositions on which most theorizing is built ‘are themselves partly constructed in those mundane social processes we recognize and name as the state’. Gledhill makes a similar point in arguing ‘that the perceived autonomy of the “political” in Western societies is one of the key ideological dimensions of Western “modernity” – not something we should take as an objective fact, but a way of representing power relations that obscures their social foundations and the way they work in practice’ (2000: 12; original emphasis).

Gledhill, however, warns against universalizing this representation as he acknowledges Clastres’s contribution to challenging the myth of the necessity of the state. This line of argument has been followed by anthropologists seeking to demonstrate that: ‘political orders and the state are not synonymous’ by pointing to diverse examples of political organizations based on kinship and societies ‘where governance was achieved through a balance of ritual groups’ (Nader, 2015: 19). As discussed above, however, these perspectives do not entirely dispense with the baseline model of western political systems. Ironically, this may undermine anthropological attempts at understanding ‘fundamental differences between forms of social life’; as Gledhill adds, ‘An investigation of how particular societies resolve universal problems may prove less interesting than a study of how and why they come to have different problems to resolve’ (Gledhill, 2000: 12).

Relationality and entanglement in approaches to the state

Are there other ways of dealing with ‘difference’ in anthropological approaches to the state? In the culturalist camp, the divide between nation-states and self-governing peoples has been reformulated in terms of ‘the resistance of culture’ as opposed to ‘a culture of resistance’ (Sahlins, 1999: xvi). That is, if the outright refusal of centralized, hierarchical forms of power is not feasible, it is still possible to ‘indigenize’ the more complex ways of state-linked social organization. Transposed to the category of ‘vernacularization’, the neat separation between state and culture can be overcome through the potentially subversive ‘assimilation of the foreign in the logics of the familiar’ (Michaud, 2017: 9; quoting Sahlins, 1999: xvi), so that ‘lineage societies throughout the world, whatever the geography and local history… make sure that what comes from the outside is duly synchronized with their own worldviews’ (Michaud, 2017: 9–10).

Nevertheless, some anthropological studies of development suggest a slightly different possibility. For example, Stacey Leigh Pigg argues that the results of her research on aid policy in Nepal do not permit speaking simply of an assimilation of dominant visions: international development models ‘become important in and through a society that is Nepalese’ (1992: 495). Similarly, the processes described in my own work on conditional cash transfers in Mexico cannot be reduced to the simple appropriation of external categories, even if certain images of aid recipients’ ‘co-responsibility’ seem to have been incorporated into conceptions of social difference and authority in some rural communities (Agudo Sanchíz, 2018). Paraphrasing Pigg’s (1992: 495) argument about the historically contextualized intertwining of different meanings of development, it may be said that, rather than perceiving the ideology of conditional aid as culturally foreign, people in those communities have ‘come to know it through specific social relationships’.

Through such relationships, alterity may be constructed and evoked in the service of diverse agendas, either to resist or to consolidate power in the context of specific development encounters. This perspective sheds light on the highly relational ways in which binary oppositions––between local and global, foreign and vernacular, inside and outside––are themselves elicited and drawn upon as part of social life and in specific interactions ‘whose own complexity is not reducible to the opposition itself’ (Yarrow, 2008a: 440; citing Pigg, 1997; and Yarrow, 2008b).

Appreciating how dualisms are employed by diverse actors to point out concealed complexities is quite different from taking such dualisms at face value. Pressure to provide expertise on ‘the other’ now comes more from outside anthropology (Eckert, 2016: 241–242), but the readiness of some of the profession to define its subject-matter as cultural difference supports boundaries constructed by other disciplines through oppositions such as core/periphery, strong/weak states, or western/alien. Pointing to the similar oppositional logics employed by development workers and anthropologists, Yarrow posits that such dualisms elude ethnographic analysis precisely because of their familiarity: ‘in searching for “difference”, anthropologists have often overlooked the role of institutional and discursive forms of knowledge that are “too well known to be described”’ (Yarrow, 2008a: 427; quoting Riles, 2001: 20).

The need for addressing the constitution of alterity in social and political relations is captured by relational theory. Advanced by Eckert, the asymmetrical interdependence that shapes power relations gives rise to the ‘societal production of institutions that (a) produce specific forms of difference, and (b) give relevance to such difference’ (2016: 242). More precisely, processes leading to appearances of independence or autonomy are made possible by specific positions of domination or subordination within interdependent relations (Eckert, 2016: 244). This ‘theorizing the sociality of difference’ resembles Thelen and Alber’s exploration of classificatory practices that reinforce the kinship/state binary and highlight ‘the productivity of these classifications in terms of both the boundaries thereby engendered and the understandings and practices they shape in contemporary societies’ (2018b: 3). Contributors to Reconnecting State and Kinship (Thelen and Alber, 2018a) also examine how concepts associated with one sphere––including corruption, patronage, descent, and incest––‘travel’ and surface in the other. Their concept of transfer resonates somewhat with Jonsson’s (2017) work regarding the long-standing propensity of humans to alternate between egalitarian and hierarchic forms of social organization.

These holistic approaches to social organization may, in turn, be important for re-examining perspectives on the state bequeathed from western political thinking. Inspired by Philip Abrams’s (1988 [1977]) critique of neo-Marxist theories of the state, Migdal and Schlichte (2005: 14–19) have reformulated distinctions among the sceptical, idealist and empirical approaches to the state as the difference between a homogenizing ‘idea of the state’––coproduced and ‘shared by opposite normative perspectives, statist and anti-statist’––and the heterogeneous ‘state practices’ that may either strengthen or weaken such state images (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 14–15).

Also influenced by Abrams’s version of the cultural turn in sociology, writers embracing a self-conscious ‘anthropology of the state’ have operationalized the distinction between state practices and the idea of the state in empirical research. Some work has focused on everyday practices (e.g. of bureaucracies and their clients) and representations (e.g. public performances of statehood) as modes through which the appearance of the state as an entity standing either above, against, or far away from society is produced or contested in the context of actual social encounters (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Gupta, 1995; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). Against the view of the state as a mere institutional or functional apparatus that can be ranked in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less’ statehood, these perspectives on the cultural constitution of states highlight the qualitative diversity of possible state forms, for even ‘states that are structurally similar may nonetheless be profoundly different from each other in terms of the meanings they have for their populations’ (Sharma and Gupta, 2006: 11).

This approach is valuable because specific interpretations of statehood may depend on particular historical experiences. The state’s cognitive dimension contributes to other dimensions and levels that influence both popular and theoretical imaginings, including the Weberian ideal of unified political structure. However, an exclusive focus on the ‘represented’ state may not entirely escape this model, concentrating on how its concomitant idea spreads in the social fabric (Bierschenk, 2009; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 4). Some authors still approach the state through processes of coercion and physical force as functions of bureaucratic rationality, which makes the state idea insufficient for the study of states (Greenhouse, 2012). Alternative inspirations drawn from authors such as Foucault or Agamben (e.g. see Gupta, 2012), although less dependent on models built after Weber, risk reducing the state to its biopolitical, regulatory and disciplinary practices, ignoring other functions like service delivery (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014b: 51–54).

The fundamental question remains: what is ‘culture’ in this context? This problem may not be solved by subsuming ‘everyday practices’ and ‘representations’ under the category of culture, or transposing the definitional problem to the category of ‘meaning’ (Bierschenk, 2009). In some works pursuing the idea of the state, culture is allowed to stand on its own as an ‘independent variable’ (Chabal and Daloz, 2006: 69) or, as Greenhouse (2012: 165) critiques, ‘something that explains, but remains fundamentally abstracted from time, space, social relationships, and interests’. Always dependent on particular places and historical moments, culture, at least in part, is how power and inequality are lived. Thus, we can take the term to mean the ideas by which inequality is justified or contested, provided that we always understand such ideas as embedded in the practical activity and social relations that produce inequality (Crehan, 2002: 2, 174 ff.). This understanding of culture enables an ethnographic approach to the cultural diversity of political forms, including ‘the question of how people participate in reforming state power (in their own minds or on the streets)’ (Greenhouse, 2012: 168).

An empirically oriented focus on how people share power and access to resources, in addition to participating in legitimation and representation, is essential for examining how ‘the state’ emerges––or not––from actors’ practices instead of from a reality of its own. No less important, the categorical distinction between state practices and the idea of the state has been operationalized by other researchers to shift focus from ‘the state’ as a unit of analysis to practices of ‘state-making (and un-making)’ connected to public and private institutions, bureaucracies and service delivery; they investigate the properties of these phenomena, ‘their “stateness” or state quality’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 15), rather than their degree of ‘statehood’.

Such phenomena can be examined ‘in their constituent dynamic entanglements’ through ‘the diachronic and synchronic analysis of interdependence’ enabled by Eckert’s (2016: 243) insights into the relationality of difference. Since the state can be seen as the result of historically and geographically specific condensations of conflicting interests in complex political fields, the analytical focus moves to intersecting power structures and the ‘entanglement of social logics’ revealed by the contemporary anthropology of organizations, public policy and development (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014b: 48). Such entanglement is illustrated in the work of Pigg and Yarrow, to which I referred earlier, and captured by Eckert’s (2016) invitation to examine historically structured contingencies and the concurrence of diverse logics of action.

Conclusion

For those who see the state as the exception rather than the rule, the salient question becomes who provides order, binding rules and collective goods or services? The notion of ‘governance’ has been employed by scholars in different disciplines to search for cases of rule-making by ‘non-state actors’ or self-regulation by ‘civil society’. Yet, these distinctions offer little help in understanding the historical processes shaping populations in diverse countries where ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors blend within intermediating networks of political parties, local governments, popular organizations and other modes of association. Such interrelationships are important for locating the political—a conglomerate of actions that share power as a means of communication—but they do this in controversially open and indeterminate ways.

Yet this diversity, this lack of centrality may make a case for the alternative projects of social organization sought by state relativists. Many who play down the importance of the state still conceive of it mainly as an institutionalized rule structure performing specific functions related to governance and security. Their search for alternatives is often cast in terms of finding supplements to, or substitutes for, such functions––whether public-private partnerships or tribal codes of honour and revenge. The search for functional equivalents to statehood does not preclude considering how resulting orders can take place under factors that unify diverse collections of actors and practices, including a meaningful framework and authorized criteria capable of organizing them. In some respects, this discussion remains confined to the ideal types basis for legitimate authority distinguished by Weber (2004): rational, traditional and charismatic.

This latent reference point is revealed when ‘culture’––viewed by neo-Weberian accounts as lying on the ‘society’ side of the state-society divide (Steinmetz, 1999: 17–18)––is taken as that which may ensure social order in ‘weak’ states or in conflicts between national governments and ‘peripheral’ egalitarian societies. Deeply engrained in western self-understanding and knowledge production, this kind of binary logic continues to travel across disciplinary boundaries, with some anthropologists re-inscribing categories that were once deconstructed in order to decolonize the discipline. There is still a risk of losing sight of historical configurations of power in accounts framed in terms of discursive oppositions (such as between state and tribe or state and kinship) that can be mapped onto distinctions between meaning and reality. In some cases, the reproduction of dichotomies is underpinned by another major assumption: culture is confined to the realm of ideas so that the state appears as a sphere of representation opposed to the concrete social and economic spheres (Mitchell, 2006: 174, 185; cf. Crehan, 2002: 184–185). In other cases, the pervasive quality of the state’s symbolic presence seems to preclude political ethnographies of the indeterminacy of power sharing, contestation and reconfiguration.

Such ethnographies are central to less normative approaches to the variability of states, which focus on specific practices and processes that may crystallize temporarily in certain patterns and meanings. While not precluding its empirical investigation, ‘the state’ can be put on hold as the result of contingent ‘social closure and compromise in the battle of conflicting interests’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014a: 15). Centred on the ‘entanglement of social logics’, this approach includes the plurality of power centres and diversity of actors engaged in regulation and service delivery in public bureaucracies and policy organizations, which elsewhere are frequently subsumed under categories like ‘different modes of governance’. This perspective enables comparative studies of statehood that dispense with classificatory analyses framed in terms of deviation from the Weberian state type, avoiding gross generalizations about extreme local situations, such as the notion of the ‘failed state’.

Finally, focusing on state-making and un-making provides another way of approaching dualisms (which can be subjects of interest as well as objects of criticism due to their deep roots in western political thought) highlighting the exchanges they afford between different disciplines and the meanings and uses they acquire inside and outside scholarly settings. Thus, popular and academic distinctions between the state and society do not result from autonomy––a purportedly inherent quality in two discrete entities––but of ‘decoupling’ or separation, an essential relational process that allows us to examine the conditions of possibility and the ‘constitution of situations that appear as given’ (Eckert, 2016: 244).