ABSTRACT
In recent anthropological writing on the state, it has become quite common to conceptualize the entity, polity, or existence of ‘the state’ in inverted commas. The implication is, to use the words of Michael Taussig (1992), that ‘the state’ is ‘a fetish’, an abstraction imagined to be ‘a thing’ on the part of both public-political as well as scholarly discourses (Navaro-Yashin 2002). The suggestion of this emergent literature for the anthropologist is to write ethnographies which would deconstruct the notion of ‘the state’, focusing, instead, on the everyday social relations which make it up.
