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- Convenors:
-
Klavs Sedlenieks
(Riga Stradins University)
Aimar Ventsel (University of Tartu)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel presents research that goes beyond normative images of the state and state relations that rely on boundaries, hierarchies, bureaucracies and dichotomies. The presentations re-evaluate the processes and interactions that constitute the state.
Long Abstract:
Literature on the state often explicitly or implicitly struggles with the concept of the state as something that can and should be analytically isolated from the rest of the social world. As such, the state has at least hypothetical boundaries (that can be also imagined, shifting, blurred or negotiated) outside or inside which various other actors are perceived to exist. Moreover, the state is imagined, described and analysed as vertical or at least as being in competition with other vertical structures. Such approaches inevitably lead to interpretations that give priority to a proper, "correct" form of the state. Various actors then seem to enact, interface with, escape or compete with this (ideal form of) the state and variously strengthen, weaken, corrupt it or make it fail. This panel presents ethnographically-based research that goes beyond such normativity and questions the direction of power dynamics (vertical, horizontal or something else) as well as the boundaries and the inclusion/exclusion of various actors in "the state". Does the state come into being through work of bureaucracies or, quite to the contrary, through not being involved with them? Does the "will of the state" trickle down from the parliament or does it originate elsewhere? When looking at the interaction and the movement of people inside and outside bureaucracies, we can challenge the existence of boundaries and the supremacy of one or another entity or activity in the context of the state and its coming into existence.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Samuel Shapiro (Université Laval)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study of the Parliament of Quebec, this paper seeks to extend arguments that the nation-state is not the necessary form of the political. On this basis, we can view the state as both distinct from its political institutions and as one of several forms of sovereignty.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I seek to expand our knowledge of the diversity of places of the political through an ethnographic study of the everyday life of a legislative institution of a federated entity, namely the Parliament of Quebec. Through such a focus, we can establish two broader analytical distinctions, firstly between the state and its political institutions and, secondly, between the state and independence or sovereignty. Regarding the former differentiation, anthropologists have long emphasized the existence of deliberative bodies for collective decision-making that are not linked to a nation-state. However, in-depth ethnographic studies of such institutions remain rare. Doing fieldwork in a legislative body reveals the diversity and heterogeneity within such institutions, which are far from synonymous with the positions and decisions taken by a majority of elected officials at any given time and even less with a singular common will of "the state". As concerns the second distinction mentioned above, whilst an expanding number of anthropologists have argued that the nation-state does not rank hierarchically above all other political entities, they have largely done so through a focus on transnationalism or non-governmental organizations. Ethnographically studying a constituent entity beyond its pro-independence movement shows that such polities coexist, without any analytical hierarchy, alongside other forms of the political. This leads to a relational view of federated entities within and beyond their federal contexts and reveals that state formation is far from a universal.
Christof Lammer (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
In a Chinese food network, images of personal relations nurtured both urban consumers' distrust in the state's regulatory capacity and their hope in a civic alternative. Informed by "stategraphy," I suggest that performances of state boundaries are key to understand these contradictory evaluations.
Paper long abstract:
During fieldwork in a network of peasant cooperatives and consumer associations in China, I observed that images of personal relations nurtured both urban middle-class consumers' distrust in the state's regulatory capacity regarding organic food and their hope in a civic alternative. These apparently contradictory interpretations of close ties as producing either "corruption" or "transparency" constitute what I call "the puzzle of personal relatedness." Similar diverging evaluations of personal relatedness can be found in the academic literature on regulation. Personal relations are regarded as a threat to the globally-travelling Western liberal model of the "independent regulator." Corruption—sometimes with a culturalist reference to guanxi (instrumentalist personal ties)—is said to be found to an extreme extent in China and thought to undermine transparency. Post-socialist anthropology, in contrast, suggested that deficiencies of socialist institutions compelled state actors and other citizens to develop guanxi to overcome shortages and, more recently, to deal with risks such as food safety. To move beyond this dead-end of presupposed (cultural or socialist) otherness in debates about regulatory success and failure, this paper adds to anthropological debates that have questioned the conventional dichotomous depiction of corruption and transparency. Informed by the relational "stategraphy" approach, the ethnography shows how positive evaluations of personal relatedness emerge as the regulating state, both in the form of state certification and agricultural experts, is both entangled and performatively distanced in the food network. Such performances of state boundaries are key to understand corruption, transparency, and the puzzle of personal relatedness.
André Thiemann (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Tracing the infrastructuring of the raspberry value chain since Yugoslav socialism, I uncover infrastructural continuities across temporal ruptures from socialism to capitalism, but also how the valuation of raspberries changes, when they circulate across political boundaries.
Paper long abstract:
The paper traces how raspberries became a major export commodity in Serbia since socialism. Focussing on the double embeddedness of global commodity chains in kinship and the state, it argues that in former Yugoslavia the raspberry economy was co-produced by state-financed science and technology and the work and tacit knowledge of farmers. This cooperative innovation became privatised and radically dispersed in the market capitalist era, so that Serbian raspberries became a major transnational competitor - the red gold of Serbia. This fragmentation also laid the foundations for the sector's present problems: overproduction, loss of 'singularity', and competition over labour. While since the 1990s the cheapness of Serbian labour has become a competitive advantage for the sector, its also limits its reproduction, as labour increasingly outmigrates to EU countries or is employed on the work benches of Western firms at home. The theoretical contribution lies in stressing the entangled roots of state, kinship, and raspberries in human and other agencies. By focusing on co-production, the making of an agricultural commodity chain is analysed as profoundly political, being embedded in complex moral economies of kinship, work, territory, knowledge, and power. The research was funded by the Riga Stradins University, the European Regional Development Fund and the Latvian postdoctoral research grant 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271 "Comparing Vital Capitals: An anthropological analysis of the global value chains of sea buckthorn and raspberries".
Klavs Sedlenieks (Riga Stradins University)
Paper short abstract:
While keeping in mind the relational approach, I propose to interpret the state through the metaphor of a three-dimensional liquid crystal and illustrate this model with an ethnographic snapshot from a small village in Montenegro
Paper long abstract:
The relational approach to state proposed by Thelen et als provide us with an unusually broad lens with which to analyse the state and include both its practices and representations. It nevertheless does no capture some aspects of the state, e.g., that the state is brought into being not only in relation with the bureaucracies and the structures of governance (what is often called "the state"), but also by a number of other efforts that can have little to do with these structures. While keeping in mind the relational approach, I propose to interpret the state through the metaphor of a three-dimensional liquid crystal. Liquid crystals can be at the same time structured and fluid. Whether it is completely liquid, solid or in between, depends on the amount of energy applied. In the state various actors attempt at administrating the right amounts of energy, to shape the level of crystallization and liquidity of the environment. The 3D nature of this model also means that depending on the perspective, the other nodes of crystallization can align in various patterns that seem meaningful - a phenomenon that explains the illusory nature of the state. I illustrate this model with an ethnographic snapshot from a small village in Montenegro where citizens try to influence construction of a road with various degrees of success. Multiple relations among the villagers, bureaucrats, politicians, the road, buildings, history and nature bring the state into being.