ANTHR 6453

The State in Anthropological Perspective

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

The state figures critically - if sometimes implicitly - in most contemporary anthropological analyses. In this course we will examine the history of anthropological (and related) treatments of the state with an eye to destabilizing the received view of the state as a unified entity capable of coherent action. We then engage with recent ethnographic work that views the state more as a process than an entity and grapple with the theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying the constellation of government agents, institutions, ideological projects, and processes that together constitute what we think of as the state.

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