scholarly journals Introduction

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Laszczkowski ◽  
Madeleine Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Anthropology Of The State ◽  
The Everyday

The aim of this special issue is to bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with the anthropology of the state as a way of working toward a more coherent, ethnographically grounded exploration of affect in political life. We consider how the state becomes a 'social subject' in daily life, attending both to the subjective experience of state power and to the affective intensities through which the state is reproduced in the everyday. We argue that the state should be understood not as a 'fiction' to be deconstructed, but as constituted and sustained relationally through the claims, avoidances, and appeals that are made toward it and the emotional registers that these invoke. This article situates these arguments theoretically and introduces the subsequent ethnographic essays.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice Ladwig ◽  
Ricardo Roque
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Strategic Policy ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Colonial Government

Engaging critically with literature on mimesis, colonialism, and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.

scholarly journals SALT AND SOVEREIGNTY IN COLONIAL BURMA

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
JAGJEET LALLY
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
British India ◽  
Administrative Capacity ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Government ◽  
Fiscal Administration ◽  
The One ◽  
Knowledge Deficits

Abstract Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

scholarly journals “THE STATE and MIGRATION IN CHINESE HISTORY”

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Family Issues ◽  
And Gender ◽  
And Migration

AbstractThis special issue of the Journal of Chinese History is dedicated to studies of the connection between migration and the state throughout Chinese history. The special editor's introduction first surveys the major types of migration within China proper, and towards the outside world, including citations to recent scholarship. It brings the eight papers of this issue into dialogue with each other around four major themes: migration and the limits of state power, the violence and trauma of migration, migration and identity, and migration and gender/family issues.

scholarly journals A Tensão entre Constitucionalismo e Exceção: a Ordem Estatal sobreposta aos Direitos Fundamentais / The Tension between Constitutionalism and Exception: when the State Order Prevails over Fundamental Rights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrique Smidt Simon
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Political Life ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Brazilian State ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
Legal Strategies

Resumo: Cada vez mais o poder público limita direitos e aumenta a repressão, sem corrigir as falhas que levam ao conflito. Isso indica o uso do direito como garantidor de ordem, não de liberdade. O intento deste artigo é mostrar, discutindo as noções de estado e constituição, o conflito entre liberdade e ordem e como o direito serve para proteger a primeira. Assim, relaciona-se a legalidade no estado contemporâneo com a limitação do poder. Faz-se, então, a relação com a ideia de nação e a prevalência da vontade do estado. Após, trabalha-se o estado de exceção e como a ordem e a coerção estatal são postas acima dos direitos e garantias constitucionais. A prevalência da ordem sobre a proteção constitucional pode ser vista nas manifestações de junho de 2013; nos rolezinhos e na situação do presídio de Pedrinhas, exemplos da lógica do estado de exceção incorporada à vida política brasileira, o que responde à discussão teórica que os antecede. Ademais, o estado brasileiro aumenta seu poder de repressão com estratégias jurídicas que diminuem seus limites ou seu controle. O texto defende a necessidade de retomar as lógicas da legalidade e do constitucionalismo para combater a naturalização do estado de exceção. Abstract: Nowadays is getting usual for the government to limit rights and expand its capacity of repression without correcting the flaws that cause conflicts. This indicates the use of the law as a way to grant order, not liberty. The aim of this article is to show, discussing the ideas of state and constitution, the tension between liberty and order and how the law should work to protect the former. Thus, the contemporaneous state is related to legality, understood as a mean to limit the state power. Then, the concept of state of exception is presented and is shown as the state order and coercion overlap constitutional rights. This overlapping can be seen in the “June 2013” protests; in the flash mob situations and in the case of “Pedrinhas” Prison. Those are examples of the logic of the state of exception embodied to the Brazilian political life. Furthermore, Brazilian state increases its repression power by using legal strategies that decrease its means of being restrained. The text asserts the need to rethink legality and constitutionalism as a way to fight the naturalization of the state of exception.

scholarly journals Preface: The Everyday Politics of Public Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattias De Backer ◽  
Claske Dijkema ◽  
Kathrin Hörschelmann
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
Anarchist Theory

While in the past two decades a rich literature has emerged about the politics of public space, many of these theoretical works and empirical studies consider public space interactions and behaviors against the backdrop of deliberative or representative politics. In this special issue, to which this article is the preface, we offer some reflections on how the everyday and the micro-level can be sites of political expression, leading inevitably to a critical discussion of the central assumptions regarding private/public space and its generational, gendered, classed, and “culturalized” construction. This analysis takes place with three theoretical axes in the background: Katz’s minor theory, anarchist theory on prefigurative politics, and Foucault, de Certeau, and Lefebvre’s work on power, knowledge, and place.

scholarly journals BEHIND CLOSED GATES: EVERYDAY POLICING IN DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA

Africa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Private Security ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Industry ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Private Policing ◽  
State Police ◽  
Private Security Industry

ABSTRACTStudies of everyday policing in predominantly white areas in South Africa often focus on the spectacle of secured architecture and private policing services, concluding that the growth of the private security industry has created atomized units of residence that are alienated from the state. Such conclusions are important but incomplete: they do not look sufficiently behind closed gates to explore how private security is justified, utilized, supplemented or avoided in daily life. In this article, I explore the everyday policing of theft and robbery in a predominantly white policing sector in Durban. I demonstrate that people have not simply transferred their dependence or allegiance from public to private policing. Instead, their approach to everyday policing straddles these two spheres, perpetually disrupts any simple dichotomy between them, and illustrates how all forms of policing are entangled in the wider inequalities and insecurities of post-apartheid South Africa. In making this argument, I highlight how residents remain reliant on the bureaucratic authority of the state police, are distrustful of their employees who supposedly protect them, and appear far more willing to take matters into their own hands than many interviewees admit or imagine.

scholarly journals Linguocultural Peculiarities of British Parliamentary Discourse

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2 (16)) ◽  
pp. 123-132
Author(s):  
Samvel Abrahamyan
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
Context Models ◽  
Linguistic Means

Peculiarities of British parliamentary discourse are largely conditioned by context models of its participants, which influence the style and linguistic forms of their speeches. As context models are culturally predetermined, linguistic means used in parliamentary discourse have also certain linguocultural peculiarities. Centuries-old traditions of British parliamentary system find their reflection in the language and form an essential part of British parliamentary discourse. The adherence to these communicative norms, including different rituals, ceremonies and traditions peculiar to British political life and British political discourse, has a special symbolic meaning and is aimed at maintaining stability of the political system, respect for the state power and its authority.

scholarly journals The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore: Getai (Songs on Stage) in the Lunar Seventh Month

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 356
Author(s):  
Hong Yin Chan
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
Short Review ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Everyday

This paper examines the interaction between state power and the everyday life of ordinary Chinese Singaporeans by looking at the Hungry Ghost Festival as a contested category. The paper first develops a theoretical framework building on previous scholars’ examination of the contestation of space and the negotiation of power between state authorities and the public in Singapore. This is followed by a short review of how the Hungry Ghost Festival was celebrated in earlier times in Singapore. The next section of the paper looks at the differences between the celebrations in the past and in contemporary Singapore. The following section focuses on data found in local newspapers on Getai events of the 2017 Lunar Seventh Month. Finally, I identify characteristics of the Ghost Festival in contemporary Singapore by looking at how Getai is performed around Singapore and woven into the fabric of Singaporean daily life.

Good Baby, Good Life

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-137
Author(s):  
Ruijing Wang
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Unusual Case ◽  
Southwest China ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
State Law ◽  
Unique Case ◽  
Socialist State

Abstract This article explores the question of ‘a good life’ through a daily-life perspective. It focuses on a case regarding the abolition of infanticide, through which the relations and interactions between the socialist state and ethnic minorities of southwest China are examined. By elaborating how an Akha custom (infanticide) that guarantees communal goodness/purity was abolished, the research reveals three competing or collaborating notions of ‘good life’, where the Akha’s cosmological ‘good life’ is partly reformed to obey state law and to meet its members’ personal desires. This is an unusual case in that the ethnic cultural authorities from a small, politically marginalised, frontier-dwelling and egalitarian group in southwest China do not ‘resist’ or ‘collaborate with’ the state in the expected way. Instead, they draw on state power to oppose their own customs. With such a unique case, the research helps to diversify our understandings of state–society relations in southwest China.

Emotions and the everyday: Ambivalence, power and resistance

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Schick
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Relations Of Power

This special issue on emotions and the everyday represents a provocative intervention in the literature on emotions in International Relations. A strong theme that emerges is the ambivalence of emotions in global politics, which I explore in two parts. First, I explore emotions’ ‘ambivalent potentiality’ in international politics, highlighting two dimensions: the ways emotions are generated and captured by relations of power and the state to create ‘willing geopolitical subjects’, and the ways emotions resist power by creating and sustaining ‘sites of contestation’ that challenge hegemonic emotional regimes. Second, I trace the contributors’ claims regarding the promise and danger of empathy in global politics, maintaining that the special issue highlights the deep ambivalence that attends empathy as well as emotions more generally. I then trouble the notion of empathy as resistance and argue that a more radical and reflexive empathetic engagement could be captured by a greater emphasis on listening and vulnerable interrogation of the self as well as the other.

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