Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic approaches to politics in contemporay anthropology show that State and Nation are ideas and discourses historically and socially crerated to figure out and build the today power relationships. We can then analyze politics as an historically located Language of Power.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic approaches to politics in contemporay anthropology and sociology show that ideas and discourses of Politics, State and Nation have been historically and variedly created to support rasing power relations. These ideas have been particullarly useful to build the new contradictory world order all along the uneven defeat of the old forms-languages of power, based on different mythologies and fetiscisms (religion, or kingdom, for example). Politics, Nation, and State appeared as real entities to the contemporary generations. However, recent researchers of politics (Ahkil Gupta, James Ferguson, Monique Nuijten, Michael Taussig, Timothy Mitchell, William Roseberry, among many others) have shown that part of the strongness of this idea of Politics lays in its character of idea-discursse that naturalizes power relationships and constrains fights and conflicts into political arenas. Anthropology can deal with politics, then, as a form of magical and mytological language of power of the today world.