This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state”.

• Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.


• Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.


• Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.