ABSTRACT
The ideas that every nation should have its own state and that every state should be a single nation may not have much solid merit either as normative or as practical proposals. Its relationship to a nation, to its nation, gives it purpose and meaning beyond these services, but ultimately it is judged on its ability to deal with those internal and external pressures which threaten to impede its provision of the national and international order necessary for the working of its politics and economics. Anthropologists are increasingly gazing on the state in ways that were not foreshadowed in the history of the field, which has been long dominated by analyses of local politics in peasant and non-state settings, for anthropologists are looking beyond the formal apparatuses of institutional power in order to focus on politics and power as found in the everyday practices of social life.
