ABSTRACT
This chapter further explores the limits of problematisation as a method in constructionist studies of the state with a focus on a single case-study analysed by James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002). As I will argue, their treatment of that case-study exemplifies many of the conceptual and methodological difficulties with ethnographically oriented constructionist studies. The aim, ultimately, in discussing this particular study is to show that constructionist and constitutionalist studies share a conviction that models represent solutions to the problem of the state. There are, of course, differences. Constitutionalist analyses operate on the premise that we require a general model to study the state. By contrast, constructionist studies argue that we can only study the state by describing how models of the state are implicated in the state-making and state-maintaining work of local actors in local circumstances – work brought to the fore in constructionist studies. The plurality of such models is taken to show that there are many possible approaches to handling the problem of the state, an insight that led to the investigation of how questions alongside an investigation of the what of the state. Where constitutionalists try to keep model building in-house as the preserve of the analyst, therefore, constructionists outsource the analytical work to those being studied.
However, it is only when we generalise from the specific problems members of society encounter in actual situations, when we attempt to analytically fix the problem of the state in place, that we are tempted to think of models of any sort as a solution. If, on the other hand, we deny that there is any single, monolithic problem of the state, if we resist what Wittgenstein termed the “craving for generality” and the “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case” he argued it displays, the path is open for investigations of a different sort, investigations that do not accord authority to models and so avoid the accompanying conceptual and methodological snares and traps. The point of such investigations would not be to deny that models can be useful (recognising that they are useful under some circumstances, not all). They would, however, undercut attempts to treat the use of models as if it were somehow independent of the nexus of social practices and circumstantial considerations within which models acquire whatever utility they can sometimes have. The critical analysis presented in this chapter sets up the focus of the next chapter where an alternative approach to the problem of the state will be outlined.
