Say “the anthropology of the state” to a room of American undergraduates and the first thing you get back is: which state? Connecticut? New York? That reflex is worth pausing on, because everywhere else in the world the word means the national government — and the second reflex, right behind it, is “wait, are we in a poli sci class?” You are not entirely wrong to ask. In Anthropological Theory for the Twenty-First Century: A Critical Approach we read three articles on state power for The History of Anthropological Thought. (Commissions earned) For broader context, see the Power Analysis hub.
- Pierre Bourdieu, “Symbolic Power” (1977)
- Begoña Aretxaga, “What the Border Hides: Partition and Gender Politics of Irish Nationalism” (1998)
- Katherine Verdery, “Seeing like a mayor. Or, how local officials obstructed Romanian land restitution” (2002)
Key Concepts
- Anthropology historically studied the not-state, leaving states and governments to political science — a division of labor that no longer holds.
- Katherine Verdery argues that “only ethnography can adequately reveal” state power, because other disciplines sit too far from the ground and question their own biases too little (343).
- Her Romanian fieldwork found that “the Party’s central control was always weaker than it pretended to be” (343) — totalitarian states project a power they may not hold.
- Post-socialist decollectivization stalled because local mayors took the land for themselves, not because central authority obstructed it (347).
- James Scott’s Seeing Like a State named the failure mode: schemes to improve the human condition from an overarching vantage point that never sees the ground. Verdery’s title is a direct play on it.
- Pierre Bourdieu’s question is how people striving and struggling nevertheless reproduce the hierarchy — how capital converts into cultural capital, into knowing how to move through the world.
- The education system sorts before anyone chooses: zip code segregates by wealth, property taxes fund the schools in it, and colleges sort again through measures that track wealth and school district — with no law doing any of it.
- Begoña Aretxaga locates nationalism’s force in affect: “the affective power of nationalism resides in its unconscious connection to formations of desire” (339).
What State? And Why Isn’t This Political Science?
In the United States “the state” always means a state, so the question comes back immediately: Connecticut? New York? Elsewhere people understand that the phrase points at the national government. That is what anthropology means by the anthropology of the state.
The second objection is the real one. A professor announces the anthropology of government and politics, and the room thinks: this isn’t what anthropology does. And traditionally it wasn’t. Anthropology spent most of its time on the not-state — and where there was a state, we assumed it wasn’t interesting and left it to the political scientists.
Two things changed that. First, the discipline that was supposed to be handling it has not obviously covered itself in glory: since 2016, the claim that political science can explain why Trump was elected is hard to take at face value. Second, and more important, the not-state societies were never actually outside states. That was true under colonialism, but it was true before it too — the Inca and the Aztec pushed other people to the margins. Even the groups we call hunter-gatherers, the supposed margins of society, were frequently formed in relationship to state societies.
Weber’s Definition, and the Punch
The most commonly cited definition comes from Max Weber: the state is an entity that successfully claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of force or physical violence within a given territory.
Try it concretely. Suppose you decide you don’t want to take the final, and you punch me. What am I supposed to do? Call the police. If you keep punching, I can punch back — maybe I get one back. But I cannot then pummel you. That would be wrong. The people who are supposed to carry out the legitimate use of violence are the police. We can question whether the definition holds in practice, but that is the definition.
What follows from it is a list of institutions: bureaucracies, codified law, prisons, a military. Anthropologists were meant to work where those were absent, among people organizing themselves without a written legal system, without the power to imprison, without a defined hierarchy.
Katherine Verdery: Only Ethnography Can Reveal the State
The person I most associate with the anthropology of the state is Katherine Verdery, because I took a class with her — and was a TA for one of her classes, badly enough that I am surprised to still be here. She taught a course called the anthropology of the state.
Her claim in this reading is direct: “only ethnography can adequately reveal” the state (343). Other disciplines are either too far from what happens on the ground, studying only elites, or they don’t question their own biases the way anthropologists relentlessly do. Anthropology gets into the local scene and keeps interrogating its own foundations — to a degree that becomes genuinely irritating around your fifth anthropology class, when it starts to feel like nothing but questions and no answers.
James Scott and Seeing Like a State
The failure Verdery is naming is the one James Scott named in Seeing Like a State: the attempt to see from an overarching vantage point that never actually sees the ground. In Scott’s argument, that is why schemes to improve the human condition from above have failed. Verdery’s title — “Seeing like a mayor” — is a deliberate play on it, moving the vantage point down.
Her example is the disciplinary embarrassment of 1989. Political science did not understand that socialism was collapsing and was surprised when the Soviet Union dissolved, because it was too far from the local scene to see it coming.
The Party Was Weaker Than It Pretended
Verdery had done ethnographic fieldwork in Romania before socialism collapsed, and her claim is that “the Party’s central control was always weaker than it pretended to be” (343). There was a projection of power from the central office that was never as strong as the projection implied.
Then came decollectivization, and it didn’t work — not because the center obstructed it, but because local mayors simply took the land and built villas on it, and neither central nor local government could do anything about it, even though it infuriated everyone and was probably illegal. Verdery is arguing against the assumption that central power was slowing this down. Central power might have wanted to. It would not have had the capacity even if it did.
This scales up into a claim about totalitarian power. Without underplaying what a totalitarian state is — nobody wants to live in one — Verdery suggests some of them may be weaker than we think, projecting an image of control, with a “relative weakness” underneath (347). She asks whether this is “further evidence of the problems inherent in research methods that overemphasize the view from the top” (347).
Pierre Bourdieu: Symbolic Power and Social Reproduction
Bourdieu’s central question is how people who are acting, struggling, and engaged in everyday activity nevertheless reproduce systemic hierarchies. He is read in education courses for exactly this: people use education to move upward, and the educational system also keeps people in line and continues the class hierarchy. Why do people vote and act in ways that preserve a hierarchy that doesn’t serve them? Why do the places that are worst off sometimes vote for people who won’t help them?
Bourdieu argues that symbolic practices are what make this work, and he is arguing against two positions at once. On one side, a crude Marxist reading where symbols don’t matter because everything reduces to the raw power of social class. On the other, the view that the symbolic field is a separate world — the art history seminar where the paintings appear to be talking only to each other, with no relationship to society.
How Capital Becomes Cultural Capital
What he is describing is how capital — money, actual capital — converts into symbolic or cultural capital. Dominance is not only raw wealth; it is that wealth translated into knowing how to navigate the world.
This is why the education system reproduces hierarchy. In higher education you don’t just learn things. You learn how to be in the world. You learn what to do when you’re invited to a dinner party — and which course taught you that? None. You learned it from being around people of a social class. You’re told to sit in the front row, so you sit in the front row. And you find your social classmate, who may become your spouse.
How the Sorting Actually Works: Zip Code, Property Taxes, College
To make this tangible I usually reach for a riff I run in Introduction to Anthropology — most of this room hadn’t taken it — about how Americans believe they find partners through romantic love, with no arranged marriages and no prohibitions, and yet people overwhelmingly pair off within their own social class. Class endogamy gets its full treatment at Marriage Anthropology. Here it is only the setup for Bourdieu’s question, which is about the machinery: how does that happen without anyone forbidding you to marry someone who doesn’t know how to hold a fork? None of it is intangible, and none of it required a law.
The first mechanism is zip code. American schools are nearly as segregated as they were before Brown v. Board of Education, and they are wealth-segregated besides. Wealth determines where you can live — and the prospect of buying a house is not looking good these days — so you end up living among people with the same wealth. Property taxes fund the schools. One zip code has wealthy residents, high property taxes, and excellent schools. Another doesn’t. Nobody passed a law. It is just the market sorting things out.
But zip code doesn’t explain everything. Someone who grew up in Montana and someone who grew up in New Jersey are not the same zip code, and they met in college. And how do colleges sort people? The SAT is formally receding but still there in the background, and SAT scores correlate almost entirely with wealth and school district. Who goes to college at all? The people who don’t are largely the working class in your town. The colleges sort, and so the people you meet when the hormones are firing are already your social class.
The Translation Problem
Bourdieu is genuinely useful here and also genuinely confusing, and it is hard to tell whether that is the French, a bad translation, or bad French. Two examples from this reading. Symbolic systems are “instruments of knowledge which exert a structuring power insofar as they are structured” (332) — the same word twice. And: “The dominant class is the locus of a struggle for the hierarchy of the principles of hierarchization” (333).
The second one does resolve. It means the dominant class is where people struggle over promoting the idea of hierarchy itself — over the proposition that we should all be looking up at them. And sometimes those people hire others from the middle class to do the ideological work, to produce things, to run the symbolic system.
Which includes me. They hired me to inculcate the principle of hierarchy in you. I am trying to fight it, but it is hard, because here you are in college and you need to live.
Doxa: Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Same-Sex Marriage
The most useful thing in Bourdieu is the structure underneath argument. When you watch people debating on television, that is the universe of opinion, where heterodoxy and orthodoxy contend. What makes the debate possible is something larger and unspoken: the universe of the undiscussed, the undisputed — doxa. That is where symbolic power actually operates. For the fuller treatment see Habitus and Doxa.
Same-sex marriage traces the whole path. Go back seventy years to the 1950s: it was not a debate. There was assumed to be no such thing. It was not in the realm of discourse at all, because the doxa was heteronormativity as the basis of marriage — you were supposed to be married, and anything same-sex happened on the side and hidden.
By the 1980s and 90s it entered as a heterodox position: not orthodox, seen as protest, a challenge to the existing system. As late as Barack Obama’s presidency he was still saying he did not agree with it. It was a matter of debate.
Then, for a while, at least among this generation, it moved into the doxa. It was simply assumed, not an argument at all.
And now it appears to be moving back into the argument phase, which is what makes the model worth having: doxa is not a destination. Things enter it and leave it.
Begoña Aretxaga: The Affective Power of Nationalism
Aretxaga was from the Basque region of Spain, and she died at 42 — far too young for the work she was doing. Her subject here is the state’s power to imagine borders, written well before the current pitch of border politics.
She builds on Benedict Anderson’s imagined community: a nation is a family of people who never meet. But her question is why that abstraction has such grip. “We need to understand how particular political imaginaries articulate with the symbolic universe of nationalism in order to account for its affective power” (339). Affect here means emotional, psychological force — and her argument is that it comes from nationalism’s entanglement with gender and family. Ireland has often figured itself as a woman’s body, and that figure gets projected onto the territory. So: “the affective power of nationalism resides in its unconscious connection to formations of desire” (339).
This matters for reading our own border politics. Everyone is exercised about the United States–Mexico border. Why is nobody exercised about the Canadians, always coming over and invading? Why be more revved up about a border thousands of miles away than one a hundred miles off? Do the arithmetic on the images on the news and the numbers are a drop in the bucket, and you will never meet most of those people. They are not coming to get you. The force isn’t in the abstraction. It is affect, felt in the body. We feel nationalist in our bodies.
The Map That Is Missing a Piece
Google maps of Ireland and something odd shows up: many of them simply omit Northern Ireland, which is in the UK. There is ocean where the six counties should be, as though that were the edge of the island.
Aretxaga’s point lands exactly there. “The Irish nation-state came into being on the condition of losing the six counties that form Northern Ireland” (341). To become Ireland the country, it had to give those up. And so: “From within the discourse of Irish nationalism, partition meant that the Irish nation came into being as a nation-state on condition of negating its self-identity as nation” (341). You can have your nation-state, but on that discourse’s own terms it is not fully a nation, because the part that is missing is missing. Including from the map.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does anthropology study the state?
Because the division of labor that gave states to political science and everything else to anthropology never described reality. Societies without states were formed in relationship to states — under colonialism, and before it, with the Inca and Aztec pushing others to the margins. And because understanding how state power operates on the ground requires the ethnographic methods anthropology has.
What does Katherine Verdery mean by “only ethnography can adequately reveal” the state?
That disciplines working from the top down see elites and formal structures while missing what actually happens (343). Her Romanian fieldwork found central control weaker than it advertised, and post-socialist land restitution obstructed by local mayors rather than by the center (347). Political science’s surprise at the Soviet collapse is her case in point.
What is symbolic capital, and how is it different from money?
Symbolic or cultural capital is what money converts into: knowing how to navigate the world. Bourdieu’s argument is that dominance is not only raw wealth but wealth translated into competence — knowing what to do at a dinner party, which no course teaches. This is why education reproduces hierarchy while appearing to offer mobility.
How does the education system reproduce class hierarchy?
By sorting people before they choose anything. Zip code segregates by wealth, property taxes fund the schools in those zip codes, and colleges sort again through measures that correlate with wealth and school district. Meanwhile what you acquire in higher education is not only knowledge but cultural capital — knowing how to be in the world, which no course teaches. No law does any of this; the market does the work that prohibition would otherwise have to.
What is doxa?
Doxa is the universe of the undiscussed — the assumptions that make debate possible without themselves being debated. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy argue within it. Same-sex marriage moved from outside discourse entirely, to heterodox position, into the doxa, and appears now to be moving back out — which shows doxa is a state things pass through rather than arrive at.
Course Navigation
This material was for The History of Anthropological Thought 2024. Following the section “On Environment,” we began “On State Power.” Next up: Necropolitics.
Related: Habitus and Doxa (Bourdieu’s framework in full) | Marriage Anthropology (class endogamy canonical) | Ethnicity and Nationalism in Anthropology (identity entrepreneurs, nation-building mechanisms) | Nation-Building in Latin America | Brackette Williams on Nationalism | Power Analysis Hub