This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state”.

Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.

Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.

Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

Aradhana Sharma is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Wesleyan University.

Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. His previous publications include Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (ed. 1997), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (ed. 1997), Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (1998), and Caste and Outcast (ed. 2002).