ABSTRACT
In the human sciences, the study of culture and the study of the state are usually separate enterprises. In the disciplinary division of labor, the state is assigned to political science and (diplomatic) history, while culture is placed in the care of anthropology and (cultural) sociology. This division of labor has been underwritten and legitimated by aligning the state/culture opposition with various other binaries-state and nation, self-interest and solidarity, institutions and culture, power and language, and so on. These oppositions are quite old and stable. This division of labor has come under challenge during the last two decades. The
challenge arose from multiple conjunctures and can be observed across multiple fronts. The historical turn within anthropology (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997 [1991]) and the cultural turn within sociology both generated a number of “culturalist” studies of the state (Geertz 1980; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Steinmetz 1999). The Foucauldian impact within the humanities led some literary scholars to roam far afield. Among early modern historians, the “confessionalization paradigm” generated much research interest in statebuilding. Even within political science, there is some evidence of a similar erosion of binary divides (e.g. Laitin 1986). Certainly, there are plenty of counter-trends. These days, the buzz in history is about
“political economy” and empire. In political science, formal models, quantitative methods, and experiments are the order of the day. In sociology, meanwhile, the once busy intersection of cultural and historical work is less traversed. Research informed by cultural and historical perspectives certainly generated impressive works of individual scholarship but-thus far-not a coherent research program. In retrospect, it looks more like a patchwork than a wave. As for cultural sociology, it has always been somewhat presentist and Americanist in orientation. Is state formation just a bridge too far for cultural sociology? Not in principle.
Many of the aforementioned binaries can be, and have been, challenged. Culturalist approaches have yielded considerable insight on other, seemingly unpromising topics, such as money and scientific institutions (e.g. Zelizer 1994; Vaughan 1996). Moreover, as state-building enters into discussion of foreign policy (e.g. Fukuyama 2004; Chandler 2005), it is important that historical and cultural sociologists counter naïve forms of
neo-conservatism, which imagine that liberal democracies simply sprout up out of the scorched earth left behind by the slash-and-burn politics of regime change. In this chapter, we will first review the theoretical threads in sociological lineages that
can inspire cultural approaches to state formation; second, examine the state of affairs and the problematics in current literature on state and culture; and, lastly, tease out four subject areas in which a cultural sociology of state formation may bear fruit.
