Summary of the Introduction:
Aradhana begins by painting us a picture of the call centres of Gurgaon. These call centres situated in business hubs forms a “new form of indenture in the global division of labour” where the North outsources to the South. She gives a brief overview of the value ladder. Addressing the central issue at question, she asks: what are the effects of outsourcing on the Indian state? Is the relationship between the state and these business friendly “zones” antithetical or compatible? While some academics like Thomas Friedman pushes for the narrative of “progressive global capitalism” surviving in spite of poor local infrastructure, others, like Aradhana herself, attributes the success of these economic zones to the policies of the Indian state. Examples include tax friendly policies as well as an educated local workforce.
Aradhana then explores the concept of “outsourcing”. She highlights how as an idea, outsourcing has been under scrutiny from actors and workers in the North because of it’s detrimental effects on structural unemployment. She also points out the irony in the United State’s open trade policies and it’s simultaneous hesitance towards labour migration. She concludes that the “rhetoric of legislation against the flight of jobs weave together national belonging, citizenship, culture, race, state work, and state control”. Turning to the meat of the essay, she claims that it is important to establish an anthropological understanding of the state in order to understand the nature of rule in a (neo)liberalizing, transnational world. She suggests that we do this by studying everyday practices and representations of the state.
Before moving on to those two areas, Aradhana introduces her methodology. She argues that new insights of the state can be gleamed by treating them as “cultural artefacts” while “simultaneously framing them within transnational dynamics”. She suggests that we can do so by examining “how cultural and representational frames articulate with structural and functional approaches to studying states, and what they reveal about the deeply cultural nature of states”, along with “shifting the focus from a national to a transnational frame, thus highlighting the translocality of the state”. Doing so will enable us to imagine the state as a “multilayered, contradictory, translocal ensemble of institutions, practices and people”. It would also enable us to reach beyond the reductionism inherent in the “more globalisation = less nation-state sovereignty = weaker states” line of argument.
To Aradhana, outsourcing represents an “reorganisation of the forces of global capitalism” that affects nation states in new ways. She brings out how, in popular discourse, globalisation is taken to be a threaten to the concept of nation state on two fronts, sovereignty and territoriality. Specifically, the territorial inviolability of nation states is challenged by “border-transgressing circulations of people, images, money and goods, and the demands of separatist ethnic movements”. State sovereignty is threatened by quasi-state-like institutions like WTO and regional institutions like the EU. Interestingly, she highlights how resistance to different aspects of globalisation is itself in ways that challenge and go beyond nation states. She brings in Keck and Sikkink’s term, “transnational network” (loose transborder affiliation of activist groups organised around specific “local” issues like environment and violence against women) to illustrate her point.
There are a few dominant strands of contemporary discourse when studying the state and the role of sovereignty in the globalised world. Some argue for the retreat of the state, others for the altered role of the state - but all of them, maintains Aradhana, assumes a relatively cohesive “national” state, and an inevitable link between state and nation. Challenging these assumptions, Aradhana shows how critics of globalisation has a habit of privileging “nation” or “nationhood” in arguing for less outsourcing. Here, Aradhana argues, the state is inevitably conceived as a nation state. The presumed association between “nation-states, sovereignty and territoriality” has been reshaped by transnational processes; and in this vein, Aradhana brings up Saskia Sassen’s concept of “unbundling of sovereignty” to indicate the altered relationship between territoriality and sovereignty where “political power and regulatory mechanisms are being reorganised at a national level”. Her choice of words here is interesting: sovereignty is argued to be “partially disentangled” from nation states and “mapped” onto supranational and nongovernmental organisations. The use of partially disentangling and mapping in this case is avoids the usual vocabulary of “shifting from” or “partially moving away from” while retaining similar substantive meanings, at least when direction of the movement of sovereignty is concerned. Anyway, after making this measured claim about sovereignty, as if anticipating a deluge of criticisms, Aradhana quickly asserts that it doesn’t mean that the nation state, “as a conceptual framework or material reality”, is useless or passé. Then she finally returns to her initial, and as of yet unproven, thesis on the assumption of “inevitable link” between state and nation. She argues that “the state, the nation and the nation-state” have been used interchangeably in scholarly discourse. Theories of state often have implicit theories of nationalism, and vice versa. However, to her, there are important distinctions. Theories of state are “largely silent” on issues of culture, while theories of nations engage in them. Questioning why this is the case, Aradhana suggests that perhaps it’s because nationalism is both an affect, and affective, which makes it easier to think of its cultural moorings, unlike the state, which is primarily conceptualised in institutional terms. This is interesting. But not as interesting as her final point, which is a meta-point about nation statism itself. Claiming that theories of nation states “assume the frame of the nation-state and a world of nation-states”, she seems to be suggesting that simply by evoking the concept of nation states, one is at once normalising nation states and delegitimising other forms of social actors, for instance NGOs, or perhaps tribal communities.
Moving on, she gives us a survey of how anthropology can contribute to the study of the state. She first lays the groundwork by pointing us to the two main ways the state has been studied in political science, via the systems approach, and the statist approach. The systems approach “highlights the difficulties in delineating clear boundaries of “the state” and argued for abandoning the study of the states in favour of the broader idea of a ‘political system”. Perhaps a bit of interpretation of this line is needed. The difficulties in delineating clear boundaries of the state might arise when we ask the question, what actions are specifically acted upon by the state, and what actions are considered societal actions? For instance, in the modern context, to what extent are state policies given in isolation, and not as a reaction, from the empirical realities of the ground? (Ok this might be a bad example, but I am just speculating as to how difficulties in delineating boundaries of the state might arise - maybe I’ll return to this later). Then, discourse changed in the 1960s to bring the state back into scholarly focus. As a reaction to Marxist functionalist notions of the state (state as instrument of capitalist class interest), scholars began attempting to establish the state as a “discrete social fact” - very Weberian, if I may - which brings us to the Statist approach to states. This approach conceptualises the state as a “clearly bounded institution that is distinct from society”, and is “often portrayed as a unitary and autonomous actor that possesses the supreme authority to regulate populations within its territories”. It also assumes the notion of the state as an a priori conceptual or empirical object, which many scholars have criticised. Most modern scholars do not take the state as a given - rather, they tend to focus on the “ideological and material aspects of state construction”. One of the most popular arguments from the anthropological perspective is that the “appearance of the state as a discrete and relatively autonomous social institution is itself a reification that is constituted through everyday social practices”. How the line separating the state from civil society comes to be drawn becomes an exercise in power and control.
Aradhana argues that “once we see the boundaries between the state and civil society is itself an effect of power”, we can “begin conceptualising the state within, and not automatically distinct from, other institutional forms through which social relations are lived, such as the family, civil society and the economy.” The problem becomes one of “figuring out how the state comes to assume its vertical position as the supreme authority that manages all other institutional forms that social relations take, and functions as super-coordinator”. Apparently mundane state activities such as the collection of taxes, the distribution of subsidised food to the poor or the issuance of passports can then be conceptualised as meaningful examples of the mechanisms of rule and workings of power. All these, of course, falls under the Foucauldian tradition of state-power analysis.
Turning to the benefits of approaching the state with an anthropological lens, Aradhana argues that by focusing on particular branches and levels of state institution, we get a “disaggregated” view of the state that shows the “multilayered, pluri-centered, and fluid nature of this ensemble that conceals different contradictions”. In addition, anthropology brings up the cultural differences in the formation of states, which is differentiated from neo-Marxist or neo-Weberian accounts of the state which sees culture as lying firmly on the “society” side of the state-society divide. She then outlines and criticises the structural and functional conceptions of the state by questioning the essential similarity in the “units” used for comparison, i.e.democratic, or authoritarian regimes. Cultural differences might in fact reflect a core difference. Because of this, we ought not, argues Aradhana, treat culture as epiphenomenal to the state.
Aradhana points out as well the problematic way states are measured as “strong” or “weak”. Doing so assumes a very specific Western conception of the state as the ideal type.
Moving further, Aradhana turns her attention to how everyday practices informs on our conception of the state. She maintains that “states that are structurally similar may nonetheless be profoundly different in terms of the meanings they have for the people”. The difference is substantiated by different ways states appear in people’s daily lives. Primarily, Aradhana argues that the state manifests itself through “banal practices of bureaucracy”. While acceding that some might interpret bureaucratic proceduralism as “apolitical”, she challenges this view by considering the example of maps: mapping and surveying are important part of the apparatus of control and legitimacy as they directly mould what states see, how they govern, and how the population perceives them. It is through proceduralism that the state comes to be “imagined, encountered, and reimagined by the population”. She brings up examples like the “rule-following behaviour” in Indian society, as well as Gupta’s ICDS to show how practices of bureaucracy is “intimately linked to cultural contestation and construction”.
One interesting way we can look at official procedures is to see them as “authorless strategies through which power is exercised and inequalities instituted”. Doing so would allow us to “disentangle intentionality from the operation of power”. The state’s iterative actions, thus, should be viewed as “performative” (Butler), where rather than being an outward reflection of a coherent and bounded state core, they actually constitute the very core. One might recall the similarities this has with the Aristotlian idea that “we are what we do repeatedly”. States are ontologically present in the bureaucratic procedures. To illustrate this point, Aradhana brings up the example of India’s Mahila Samakhya program, which is a grassroots program that “empowers” women by teaching them how to construct proper paper trials. Doing so would enable the uneducated, poor and non-literate to be in a position of lesser disadvantage when dealing with the state. Aradhana also admits that the relationship between bureaucracy and its reproduction is not as straightforward as it seems, given that there is a possibility of subversion from both the civilians as well as within the bureaucracy. Jeeps with official license plates, development workers with census forms, all these show how “representations, symbols, practices, and materiality are linked”. Interbureaucratic conflicts occur when the intentions and goals of high ranking officials are never realised during implementation when bureaucrats adhere to the letter but not the spirit of the policy. Programs may thus work out in unintended ways or suffer unlikely consequences.
Representations, according to Gupta, comprise another “key modality” through which states are culturally constituted. It refers to ways in which states are represented, through newspapers, the media, etc. Public representation and “performance of statehood” is crucial in shaping people’s perceptions about the nature of the state. Through localised images and experiences, the state is discursively imagined as “something greater than simply its local manifestations”. The dialectic between practices and representations, however, opens up the possibility of dissonance between ideas of the state gleaned from representation and personal encounters with official entities. This might lead to a “rupture of the hegemony and singularity” of the state. Finally, the focus on representation allows us to examine the mechanisms by which the extraction and redistribution of surplus, as well as the production of relations of production are accomplished and legitimated.
In the final section - this summary is getting too long - Aradhana explores how states are now constructed by transnational discourses. Citing the act of representing Third World states by decreasing order of development (present in the UN), a certain set of “needs, characteristics and interventions” are produced. This has the effect of positioning states as primary agents for national development, which might be an obvious, but important point, for it affects the how governments understand the mandate for national development. The “scramble” for governments to appear neat, lean and efficient is reflective of a broader neoliberal discourse which emphasises civil society, privatisation and the rollback of welfare programs. This highlights how transnational pressures can lead to a broader neoliberalization across the world, especially towards less developed countries. In pursuing this line of thought, Aradhana tries to establish exactly how neoliberalism has transformed the way the nature, boundary and role of the state are represented. She observes a “shrinking” boundaries of the state in two sense. First, the “transnational organisation of global capitalism is forcing a different regime of regulation of national economies by their respective states.” This is essentially saying that the organisation of national economies are severely influenced by the global dance of capital. The corollary of this - which is the second point - is that the redistributive role of states is highly curtailed, as liberalisation programs like SAPs, austerity measures and privatisation programs have led to a shrinking of tax base. An interesting point Aradhana makes here is that while this represents a “degovernmentalization of the state”, it also signals an increased “governmentalization of society”.
In highlighting what transnationalism brings to the study of states, Aradhana maintains how it challenges the Weberian notion of states as holding “monopoly over violence” of a territory. The US occupation of Iraq, UN peacekeeping missions, all point to how the role of the state in maintaining security is weakened. The emergence of global human rights organisations is another key factor that challenge state monopoly of violence. To a degree, these issues have been repeated invoked in China-US foreign relations meetings. The effects, however, are uncertain. As rather characteristic of Aradhana, she warns against the celebration of the “current incarnation of the human rights regime as the solution to global inequalities”, for it might be dangerous in its dependence on US hegemony. Urging us to rethink the “state” in a context where the national space is transnationally defined, Arad brings up the issue of migration. Diasporic movements point to how the “space of the “nation” and the affective ties that bind this imagined community are expanding across the boundaries of the nation-state”. Citizenship too is being imagined, practiced and regulated transnationally and flexibly; on top of being unevenly experienced and spatialized, both transnationally and nationally. A very interesting example brought up by Aradhana evokes the Indian state’s category of “Non-Resident Indians” and the “People of Indian Origin” to enable them to have easy access to investment opportunities in India. This creates the new subjectivity of diasporic subjects as India’s economic saviours. I would also like to add that the e-citizenship program of Estonia also provides a fascinating case study. The birth of sovereignty, for instance in the case of contemporary Kurdistan or during the breakup of Yugoslavia, would inevitably be presided over by transnational entities like the UN.
Thus, we conclude this summary.
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