"State and its margins. Comparative ethnographies" in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe (NM), 2004

Abstract

Anthropology offers a radical rethinking of the state when it interrogates itself about what would constitute an Ethnography of the state. Western Political Theory has conceived the state as a rational administrative form of political organization and order. One of the effects of thinking the state in terms of ordermaking functions is that the spatial and social margins that so often constitute the terrain of ethnographic fieldwork are seen as sites of disorder, where the state has been unable to impose its order. However, reversing the question is also possible, therefore interrogating what is the state when it is seen as embedded in practices, places and languages considered to be at the margins of the nation-state. From the anthropological point of view, margins provides an unique perspective to the understanding of the state, not because it captures the exotic practices of the so considered "failed states", but because it suggests that such margins are a necessary entailment of the state, and in so doing, invites us to rethink the boundaries between center and periphery, public and private, legal and illegal.