The "State Idea'' in Theory and Practice

Recent anthropology of the state is influenced by sociology's cultural turn-taking up "the state idea'' as situated meaning. The works reviewed here pursue the state's idea of itself-in two cases through state projects of extreme social and cultural engineering, in two as a comparative problem. Notwithstanding differences of purpose and approach, the authors evince tacit points of convergence around the state as a form of modernism, as a function of elite interests, and as a localized process of depoliticization, associating dissent with cultural authenticity. The essay relates these points to western state nationalism and current ethnographies of political subjectivity.