Ethnographies of the State

Ethnographies of the State

States, or institutions that could be recognized as such, have played important roles in the lives of much of humanity for decades if not much longer. The power of the nation-state system is such that territories, populations, or individuals who happen to fall outside the influence of a state for one reason or another are seen as aberrant - the continuing conceptual weight of the state system is thus re-inscribed through concepts of “stateless populations,” “failed states,” and the like. Scholars from various disciplines have dedicated considerable time and energy to studies of the state. In particular, James Scott's anthropology of the state system, Seeing Like a State (1998) has inspired significant work Because of the privileged position held by the state in constructing physical and social space, ethnographies of the state seem, at face value, to be a sensible and even necessary proposition. This essay is an attempt to work through some of these complications that emerge when ethnographies of the state are considered on a deeper level, first examining several complications inherent in ethnographic writing around the state, and then examining several examples of the technique.

As a result of the pervasive influence of state-thinking, it could be said that many ethnographies are, at least partially, ethnographies of the state, in that they necessarily involve examination of the ways in which sovereign power is felt by individuals and communities. The focused application of an ethnographic lens to State organs themselves may also be of use, both in order to gain deeper understandings of the internal logics that inform their actions and in order to provide context that will allow for deeper understandings of the ways in which societies and communities are shaped by their existence within, outside, or on the margins of a state system.

Despite the readily apparent usefulness of an ethnography of the state, however, it is only relatively recently that ethnographic studies of the state have been seriously taken up, as noted by Chatterji in her 2005 report on a workshop that considered the topic. This is likely due at least in part to the numerous difficulties that present themselves to anyone attempting to carry out ethnographies of the state itself. As Chatterji notes, the question of whether ethnographies can be performed on a “Macro subject” remains open. As she reports, the papers presented at the workshop were organized around notionalities of the state that tended to focus on specific state practices or elements of the state-society relationship, complicating the position of any ethnographer who attempts to perform an ethnography of the state as a unit in itself. Furthermore, the nature of the state itself is contested, and some commentators have long argued that the State itself is a phantasm, offering nothing useful to social analysis. Adams goes so far as to argue that “the State as a special unit of social analysis does not exist as a real entity.” (1977, 79). While this perspective has largely been blunted in favor of arguments that recognize a complex interplay of state and nonstate actors in maintaining institutionalized power, difficulties remain, and indeed multiply.

As Trouillot argues in his analysis of the situation confronting anthropologies of the state under neoliberalism, despite the fact that “there is no necessary site for the state, institutional or geographical,” (2001, 127) its relevance is not decreased. In fact, “if the state is indeed a set of practices and processes and their effects as much as a way to look at them, we need to track down these practices, processes, and effects whether or not they coalesce around the central sites of national governments.” (130) Thus, ethnographies of the state must not attempt to focus solely on state organs in themselves, but rather broader views of governmentalities that are spread and shared between official state practice and civil societies – Ferguson and Gupta argue in their move towards ethnography of neoliberal governmentality, that the goal ought to be “an approach that would take as its central problem the understanding of processes through which governmentality (by state and non state actors) is both legitimated and undermined by reference to claims of superior spatial reach and vertical height.” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 995) Bringing the state and civil societies together in this way ultimately leads Ferguson and Gupta to question the very distinction imbedded in the term “non-governmental organization.” (995) One particular site for this study, noted by Truillot (2001) should be the state function of bordering and regulating migration, one of the few elements of sovereignty still solely dedicated to the sovereign state under neoliberalism, a concept that will be further discussed below. What follows are readings and analysis of four very different ethnographies of (various) states.

Ferguson and Gupta, in their previously cited article Spatializing States: Towards and Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality, use ethnographic research from an Indian state program entitled Integrated Child Development Services (IDCS), which attempts to provide, as the title suggests, a package of well-integrated services that would decrease infant mortality and provide various early-childhood education services. The program, as Ferguson and Gupta describe it, was administered as a relatively traditional top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, with separate contingents of planners, area managers, and a local staff of two individuals per center (again hierarchically divided, of course, into the roles of Worker and Helper). Ferguson and Gupta analyze this formation as presenting interesting questions with regards to the position of the state in a vertical hierarchy as related to life in the villages where the program took place, as the state exists both “above” the village level (through a bureaucratic hierarchy that exerts pressure on and through local-level workers) and “within” the community itself, as the Worker and Helper are situated as being within and “of” the community. (985)

Through the practice of inspections, the IDCS regional offices perform the state-building work that allows it to encompass a broad territory. Administration, data analysis, and other “high-level” functions are carried out in the central office, but through the practice of random, unexpected inspections, the central office is able to perform surveillance and regulation, thus allowing the system to “represent and embody state hierarchy and encompassment” (985, emphasis in original). This representation entails the generation of recursive data-gathering, as one of the primary functions of the Worker and Helper in the villages is to generate and report data on the children they work with – this data is then gathered again by the regional functionaries through their surprise inspections. (987)

Kamran Asdar Ali, in his 1996 ethnography of family planning practices in Egypt, contributes ethnographic research that focuses on family planning policies carried out by the state there under conditions of (neo)coloniality and modernization. Ali attempts to use ethnographic methods to illuminate the ways in which state policy, rather than emanating from a unitary and powerful “state actor” instead are instead contested and implemented by multiple networks of actors on national, local, and international levels. The implementation of the family planning program not only situated the Egyptian state in geopolitical space, but also provided a way for the Egyptian government to “see like a state” in that specific actions that were implemented as part of the program were used not only in order to carry out the explicit goals of the program, but also in order to shore the program (and, therefore, the state itself) up against perceived resistance from Islamic groups. (16) This resistance viewed state attempts to legislate family planning as a cultural affront based on Western imperialism, a claim that not unfounded, as the program was largely funded by the United States. (15)

In its struggle with Islamist groups, the Egyptian state attempted to shore up its legitimacy; Ali writes that, in this framework “contraceptive use may also be […] seen as a symbolic parameter to gauge support and identify opposition by the State.” (19) Contention over the program (and, therefore, the meaning and modernization of the Egyptian state) spanned multiple levels. While family planning programs were largely administered as a response to conceptions of development, modernity, and “proper” state action that originated in the West (see Mitchell 1995) and were funded and promoted by international institutions, the Islamicist resistance to family planning also took on an international dimension, as it was couched in a rhetoric of international Muslim solidarity against Western encroachment, and, as Ali writes, “For many, the internationally assisted family planning programme was part of a larger Judaeo-Christian plot to weaken the Muslims of the world.” (18)

In his study of state centralization in Peru, David Nugent examines conflict and cooperation in state formation from a lens that focuses not on the center of State power itself, but from the margins – in this case, Chachapoyas, a region in the northern sierra where marginalized groups have responded in very different ways to policies of State centralization in distinct historical periods. Specifically, during one wave of centralization in the 1930s, the State was welcomed as a protector, while in the 1970s, state centralization was seen as immoral, and communities actively resisted state centralization. (333)

Nugent's study is framed as an intervention in theoretical debates around conception of state and society, opposing the view in which the State is assumed to be in constant conflict with the populations over which it exerts sovereignty. In order to make this argument, Nugent offers a detailed historical study of regional history that illuminates the ways in which populist movements in the region allied with the state in the 1930s in a shift towards increased state centralization (viewed by locals as more egalitarian), as opposed to the previous, uneasy relationship in power over the remote region was shared between state bureaucracy and a power system held together by networks of local elites. (345-46) However, after a long period of centralization and increasing connection between the capitol in Lima and Chachapoyas, the military junta that took power in 1968 attempted to implement still greater centralized control through direct state appointments of officials, as opposed to the previous formal (electoral) and informal (patronage) systems that had allowed marginal residents to access politics in the center. This arrangement led to mobilizations by local groups that actively resisted the power of the centralized state, to the extent that in Chachapoyas, locally established comunidades de lucha y fe established de-facto autonomy with regard to several infrastructure projects. (354)

Through her dissertation research, which would later be published in multiple forms, Alison Mountz sets out explicitly to undertake “an ethnography of state practices” (2007, 38), performing ethnographic interviews and participant observation in the bureaucratic setting of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, a state agency tasked with administration of immigration law and policy. In two sources, (a book chapter dedicated primarily to the description of her methods entitled Smoke and Mirrors: An Ethnography of the State, and the book Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border) Mountz goes into great detail not only about the arguments that can be constructed through her examination of Canadian immigration bureaucracy, but also about the difficulty of the method itself. In particular, she highlights the difficulty of working within a bureaucracy that actively defended itself and its secrets against what certain bureaucrats saw as her prodding investigation, while other individuals were perhaps more open than their roles would legally allow (2007, 40). Ultimately, what Mountz finds interesting in her 2007 piece is her own relationship with the State (or, rather, with is bureaucracy): Identities are performed on all sides, and Mountz' own self-conception was picked apart and reconstructed by the bureaucracy at the same time as she attempted to perform her own analysis.

In Seeking Asylum, Mountz applies the research she examined in Smoke and Mirrors, attempting to decompress the impression of a monolithic bureaucracy held by lawyers, immigrant advocates, service providers, and other extra-governmental individuals working on immigration issues (2010, 56). Instead of a fully in-control and functional bureaucratic system able to manage the issues thrust upon it, Mountz finds a “beleagured bureaucracy” (65) in which participants often consider their work in terms of recurring “crisis”, and individual workers are often transferred, resulting in an inability to construct the kind of deep institutional knowledge that is viewed (even by members of the bureaucracy) as necessary for a successful response to human smuggling, part of the organization's stated purpose.

The four ethnographies of the state described above differ substantially in their methodological approach. Ferguson and Gupta make a primarily literature-based argument, specifically attempting to intervene in debates about ethnographies that seriously consider governmentalities in the context of neoliberalism, including relatively brief ethnographic material primarily as an example of the ways in which their theoretical-methodological ideas might be applied. Ali exposes even less explicitly ethnographic material in creating his argument, but makes an argument that directly addresses questions about the shape of relations between the state, non-state actors, and supernational institutions. Nugent, on the other hand, works entirely within one small regional area, but draws conclusions about state-building through historically-comparative work that brings together and analyzes information about a particular region, in ways that may be the most like a traditional ethnography of all the research presented here. Finally, Alison Mountz examines a specific state bureaucracy, performing the most obvious example of an ethnography of a state organ while also demonstrating reasons why this type of research is not more common, as many state bureaucracies are capable of confining or otherwise thwarting researchers, and turning an analytical gaze back upon their own projects and performances.

Despite these differences, the ethnographies I examined bear out many of the preoccupations present in the analyses of state ethnographies with which I opened this essay. Unsurprisingly, none of the ethnographies I read attempted to fully encapsulate a state in and of itself; as expected, the variety of ethnographic subjects examined included significant links between states, international institutions, civil society, and other actors, in ways that suggested a difficulty of fully separating “the State” from the broad field of actors which also institute governmentality. In response to Chatterji and the question of examining the State as “macro subject”, all of the ethnographies I read considered only small fragments of the state system, and built their analysis either outward or inward from that more manageable position. This is to be expected, but also leads to the question of where the frontiers of this type of study might lie. Scott, after all, was able to make sweeping claims about the nature of State practice, which have largely held up to sustained use in various academic projects. However, any attempts to perform ethnographies of a unitary state seem to inevitably lead to hazy questions about the boundaries, both physical and conceptual, of that institution. It may be, then, that ethnographies of the state system are possible, despite the fact that ethnographies of a state remain out of reach for various reasons.

Works Cited

Abrams, Philip. "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)." Journal of Historical Sociology 1.1 (1988): 58-89. Print.

Ali, Kamran A. "The Politics of Family Planning in Egypt." Anthropology Today 12.5 (1996): 14-19. Print.

Chatterji, Roma, Rajni Palriwala, and Meenakshi Thapan. "Ethnographies of the State: Report of a Workshop." Economic and Political Weekly 40.40 (2005): 1-7. Print.

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. "Spatializing States: Toward and Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality." American Ethnologist 29.4 (2002): 981-1002. Print.

Mitchell, Timothy. "The Object of Development: America's Egypt." Power of Development. Ed. Jonathan Crush. London: Routledge, 1995. 129-57. Print.

Mountz, Alison. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2010. Print.

Mountz, Alison. "Smoke and Mirrors: An Ethnology of the State." Politics and Practice in Economic Geography. Ed. Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck, and Trevor Barnes. London: SAGE, 2007. 38-49. Print.

Nugent, David. "Building the State, Making the Nation: The Bases and Limits of State Centralization in "Modern" Peru." American Anthropologist 96.2 (1994): 333-69. Print.

Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. "The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind." Current Anthropology 42.1 (2001): 125-38. Print.