Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued).
The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
Overview
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