States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
432
States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State
432eBook
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Overview
Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle.
This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history.
Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822381273 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2001 |
| Series: | Politics, History, and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 615 KB |
About the Author
Thomas Blom Hansen is a Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Read an Excerpt
States of Imagination
Ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial stateBy Thomas Blom Hansen
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2798-8
Chapter One
"DEMONIC SOCIETIES" Liberalism, Biopolitics, and SovereigntyMitchell Dean
In a lecture at Stanford in 1978 Michel Foucault said: "Our societies have proved to be really demonic since they happen to combine those two games-the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game-in what we call modern states" (1988c: 71).
What could such a statement possibly mean? Was this a case of hyperbole, an attempt to catch the ear of an American audience, designed to convince them of his critical intent and credentials? Was it something we were meant to pass over quickly and move on to the more detailed analysis of different forms of what he called "political rationality"? Or did this statement summarize and encapsulate a certain dimension of what Foucault would identify as the arts of government, as I suggest in this essay? As is well-known, the modern literature on these "arts of governing" arises, for Foucault, with the crisis of spiritual government and the pastorate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It inquires into a multiplicity of problems "concerning the 'right way' to govern children, a family, a domain, a principality" (Foucault: 1997a: 68). Foucault's theme, therefore, is of "a more general questioning of government and self-government, of guidance and self-guidance," ofall the attempts at the calculated direction of conduct undertaken by various authorities. This extends "beyond the state" to the programmatic activity of communities and community organizations, unions, corporations, and associations of all kinds. It even extends to those attempts we ourselves make to transform our own conduct with different objectives in mind so that we might become a different kind of person. In brief, government for Foucault refers us to the theme of the "conduct of conduct."
This essay is in large part a critical exposition of Foucault's general schema for understanding these arts of governing. It argues that this schema cannot be properly understood without reference to concepts such as biopolitics and sovereignty. The point of this exposition is not philological, however. Rather, it is to deepen our understanding of the resources that an analytics of government has to draw on and of some of its critical bases. It is also to suggest some of the limits of Foucault's interpretation of political rationality. Foucault's 1978 statement is a useful epigraph for this task.
This statement is not without its problems. Foucault assumes that we know what he means by "our societies." In common with the vast majority of European and North American theorists, he was resolutely "metropolitan" and Eurocentric. His analyses tend to assume that one can talk relatively coherently about forms of government, rule, and power that are internal to, as he puts it, "what we call modern states," in isolation from the relations between states and other political formations. As many have suggested, most notably Ann Laura Stoler (1995), the study of colonial power relations and colonial bodies is largely absent from Foucault's studies of discipline and sexuality. More recently, a number of writers have noted that Foucault's account of the art of government finds its limit in a relative neglect of issues of international government, and the international forms of government that are among the constitutive conditions of sovereign states. It is thus fair to say that Foucault's analyses of the arts of government, with some significant exceptions and indications in his lectures, are largely "internalist." That is, they ignore the international arts of government that are the condition of these relatively autonomous, sovereign, territorially bounded states, and the practices that assign populations to specific states in the modern system of states. When Foucault discusses "our societies," we know he means the populations that are assigned to the territorial unities of liberal-democratic states of Europe and North America and perhaps certain of their antipodean derivatives. More deeply, he also appears often to assume that these states unproblematically coincide with relatively autonomous and bounded unities called societies.
Turning to the term "demonic," it would perhaps be permissible to read this term as analogous to Socrates' "daemon," which, as Pierre Hadot puts it, was both a kind of inspiration that came over him in an irrational manner and his real "character" (1995: 164-65). The demonic would thus be the irrational and inspirational character of modern states, even accounting for something of their dynamism and capacity for political invention. There is something in this interpretation. Here, however, I argue that we should also understand this term in a much stronger sense, as a reference to what bedevils modern forms of government and rule, and to that which, at least in part, can help us pose the problem of political danger and evil. I suggest that Foucault sought to pose the problem of the political danger as that which lurks in our rationalities and techniques of government in the various attempts to combine elements of the "shepherd-flock" and "city-citizen games." This understanding is borne out by certain other texts that are in a not distant proximity to this one. The Stanford lectures, with their focus on pastoral power, reason of state, and Polizeiwissenschaft, are based on material from Foucault's course on "Security, Territory, Population" in 1978 (1997a: 67-73). There is more than a trace of the same problem of political evil in evidence in the extraordinary final lecture Foucault gave in his previous course in 1976 (1997b: 213-35) and the final chapter in the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1979b). There, the shepherd-flock game takes the form of the modern life politics, biopolitics, and the city-citizen game is cast in the language and practice of sovereignty. In both of these earlier texts, Foucault uses National Socialism as a key example of certain of the dangers perhaps more discretely manifest in other doctrines of rule.
This further elaboration raises other types of problems. These arise from a potentially "totalizing" reading of the above statement. On the one hand, such a statement might appear to suggest that we do not have to engage in a genealogy of the specific ways in which the arts of government are shaped and imagined within particular contexts. It is of course necessary to consider not only the pervasiveness of different rationalities of rule, such as sovereignty and biopolitics, but also how they are articulated in specific contexts. This is the case, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial era, when such rationalities are articulated with alternative, older, or "indigenous" forms of authority and government. On the other hand, such a statement might be read in a manner that underplays the contingent, unruly nature of these rationalities and the manner in which they become available to be used by different political actors in contestation. Indeed, to follow Hindess (1997), one might suggest that the use of the term "political rationality" in this context is rather limited in that the identification by Foucault of political rationality with rationalities of government does not leave room for the political per se. An example of this is when a liberal rationality of government is concerned to limit or regulate the effects of the partisan action of factions on the work of government. We need to consider the way rationalities of how we govern and are governed are articulated with rationalities and forces that seek in some manner to affect the employment of such rationalities. Thus, we need to consider what Weber called "politically oriented action," that which "aims to exert influence on the government of a political organization; especially at the appropriation, redistribution or allocation of the powers of government" (1968a: 55). Thus, we need to examine action that is oriented to affecting the government of an organization, as much as action oriented to shaping conduct. Or, to put it in Foucault's terms (1988a: 19), we need to discuss the ways in which these rationalities and technologies of government are articulated with "strategic games between liberties," that is, how they enter into a field of political forces.
My exposition above suggests that the demonic character of modern societies, according to Foucault, stems from the unholy combination of two distinct trajectories: that of sovereignty and that of biopolitics. It may be that such a view cannot be maintained. The effect of Giorgio Agamben's (1998) argument would appear to be that there is a much closer and longer bond between politics and life than Foucault allows. Drawing on Aristotle, Agamben argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, is distinguished from bios, or politically or morally qualified life. The constitution of the political is made possible by a kind of exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously makes bare life a condition of politics. Life is included in politics, not by the eighteenth-century emergence of biopolitics, but at the very genesis of Western conceptions of politics, by its very exclusion.
This is not the place to rehearse the details of Agamben's appreciative critique of Foucault, but he does indicate the possibility that Foucault has underestimated the extent to which sovereign forms of power were constituted in relation to notions of life. In so doing, Agamben might be read as contributing to an analysis of how modern democratic conceptions of sovereignty already contain assumptions about life in relation to politics that open them to readily and somewhat surreptitious colonization by biopolitical imperatives. However, Agamben himself may risk a lack of attentiveness to the specific character of modern biopolitics.
Despite all the possibilities of reductive readings of ethnocentrism, of an unexamined focus on nation, and of a form of totalization that threatens to neglect historical singularity and the field of contestation, this statement of two forms of rule advances our understanding of our imagination of the political in two ways. First, it establishes the importance of the longue duree of two very broad-and intertwined-trajectories of rule. Second, it argues that many current problems and dangers are located not in one or the other of these trajectories but in the attempt to put together elements of the rationalities found along these trajectories in the government of the state. That is, whether political actors take the form of an incumbent regime, a party, or a social movement, those who attempt to affect the government of the state are forced, in very different contexts, to try to force together aspects found along these two trajectories. And, to allow for Agamben, the point of articulation is found in the different conceptions of life.
Foucault's statement, then, locates the problem of political danger in the combination, the "tricky adjustment" between two modes of exercising rule. The shepherd-flock game, or what he elsewhere calls pastoral power, has its birth in Hebraic and early Christian religious communities. Its genealogy concerns its transformation into a centralized and largely secular exercise of power over populations concerned with the life and welfare of "each and all" with the development of the administrative state in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The city-citizen game has its sources in Greco-Roman antiquity and notions of the polis and res publica and concerns the treatment of individuals as autonomous and responsible political actors within a self-determining political community. This mode of exercising power has been transformed by modern liberal and republican doctrines, notions of direct and representative democracy, and, most crucially, by the key status of citizenship being granted to certain members of the population within the territorial state.
One way in which the attempted articulation of these elements may be viewed as demonic concerns the vacillation over the status of the welfare state. On the one hand, national governments are loath, for a variety of reasons, to do anything that might undermine the responsible freedom of those who can exercise active citizenship and even seek to reform social provisions so that it might transform certain groups into active citizens. On the other hand, governments must find a way of providing for those with needs whether due to human frailty and mortality or the nature of the capitalist labor market itself. The genealogy of the welfare state seems to be bedeviled by this problem of trying to find a norm of provision that can adjust the competing demands of a subject of needs with the free political citizen. We can note that that genealogy would also show that this problem of welfare states is also a problem of the relations and competition among sovereign states, most recently reconfigured as an issue of economic globalization.
Important as this welfare state problem and its ramifications are, I want to focus here on another aspect of this demonic character of modern states. This is the character of what I call, for want of a better term, authoritarian forms of rule. This term encompasses those practices and rationalities immanent to liberal government itself that are applied to certain populations held to be without the attributes of responsible freedom. More directly, it refers to nonliberal and explicitly authoritarian types of rule that seek to operate through obedient rather than free subjects or, at a minimum, endeavor to neutralize opposition to authority.
Very broadly, then, this retranslation of Foucault's sentence on the demonic nature of modern states amounts to something like the following: All versions of what might loosely be called modern arts of government must articulate a biopolitics of the population with questions of sovereignty. And it is the combination of these elements of biopolitics and sovereignty that is fraught with dangers and risks. I turn first to the triad liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty before examining nonliberal types of rule.
Liberalism, Biopolitics, Sovereignty
From the end of the eighteenth century until perhaps quite recently, there existed a common conception of government. This was true for those who criticized and sought to limit existing forms of government and those who argued for their extension, their coordination and centralization. Government would be regarded as a unitary, centralized, and localized set of institutions that acted in a field that was exterior to itself. It would no longer be purely concerned with "the right disposition of things arranged to a convenient end," as La Perriere had argued (cited in Foucault 1991: 93). The government of things would meet the government of processes. To govern would mean to cultivate, facilitate, and work through the diverse processes that were to be found in this domain exterior to the institutions of government. These processes would variously be conceived as vital, natural, organic, historical, economic, psychological, biological, cultural, or social. They would be processes that both established the paradoxical position of life as at once an autonomous domain and a target and objective of systems of rule, as at once excluded and included within the exercise of sovereign power.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction: States of Imagination / Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat
I. State and Governance
“Demonic Societies”: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty / Mitchell Dean
Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India / Akhil Gupta
The Battlefield and the Prize: ANC’s Bid to Reform the South African State / Steffen Jensen
Imagining the State as a Space: Territoriality and the Formation of the State in Ecuador / Sarah A. Radcliffe
II. State and Justice
The South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation / Lars Buur
Reconstructing National Identity and Renegotiating Memory: The Work of the TRC / Aletta J. Norval
Rethinking Citizenship: Reforming the Law in Postwar Guatemala / Rachel Sieder
Governance and State Mythologies in Mumbai / Thomas Blom Hansen
III. State and Community
Before History and Prior to Politics: Time, Space, and Territory in the Modern Peruvian Nation-State / David Nugent
Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala / Finn Stepputat
In the Name of the State? Schools and Teachers in an Andean Province / Fiona Wilson
The Captive State: Corruption, Intelligence Agencies, and Ethnicity in Pakistan / Oskar Verkaaik
Public Secrets, Conscious Amnesia, and the Celebration of Autonomy for Ladakh / Martijn van Beek
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
This outstanding volume contains an excellent introductory discussion of current trends of thinking and research on the state. The first-rate articles by a mix of well-and less-known scholars are sophisticated, nuanced, and accessible.
— George Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin
With its wealth of empirical description coming from all parts of the postcolonial world, this book is an immensely valuable contribution to the new ethnography of the state. Hansen and Stepputat have put together a richly varied but carefully organized and theoretically productive set of studies.
—Columbia University