just summarizing each of the 5 readings pdf (102 pages total) and developing a 5 synthetic questions about the relationship between civil society, international organizations, and the international political system as it pertains to development from. If you can have the summary correlate with the topic above that would be perfect. about 900 words, no responses.
spatializing states: toward an ethnography of
neoliberal governmentality
JAMES FERGUSON
University of California, Irvine
AKHIL GUPTA
Stanford University
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging
long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we
seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: vertically
(thestate is “above”society) andencompassment (thestate “encompasses” its
localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in
India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second
part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of
grasping how new practices of government and new forms of “grassroots”
politics may call into question the principles of vertical ity and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states’ authority over
“the local.” [states, space, governmentality, globalization, neoliberalism,
India, Africa]
Recent years have seen a new level of anthropological concern with the modern
state. In part, the new interest in the state arises from a recognition of the central role
that states play in shaping “local communities” that have historically constituted the
objects of anthropological inquiry; in part, it reflects a new determination to bring an
ethnographic gaze to bear on the cultural practices of states themselves. An important
theme running through the new literature has been that states are not simply functional bureaucratic apparatuses, but powerful sites of symbolic and cultural production that are themselves always culturally represented and understood in particular
ways. It is here that it becomes possible to speak of states, and not only nations (Anderson
1991), as ‘Imagined”—that is, as constructed entities that are conceptualized and
made socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that
require study (Bayart 1993; Bernal 1997; Cohn 1996; Comaroff 1998; Coronil 1997;
Corrigan and Sayer 1985; cf. Fallers 1971; Geertz 1980; Joseph and Nugent 1994;
Nugent 1997; Scott 1998; Taussig 1996).
