Publisher's Synopsis
The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and in the popular imagination as an abstraction, grasped as pervasive, a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins. Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts marginal to 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).
