Panel

EUROSEAS 2010 Panel Submission

State/Subject/Subjectivities:
The Micro-politics of State-making in Southeast Asia*
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Organizer: Upik Djalins, Development Sociology, Cornell University
Discussant: Prof. Henk Schulte Nordholt, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

In recent years, the study of “the state” has enjoyed a revival among social science scholars. Following Philip Abrams (1988) seminal work, fresh approaches employed by scholars unpacked “the state” from its naturalness and its appearance of structure, as demonstrated in Mitchell (1991, 1999), Joseph and Nugent (1995), Steinmetz (1999) and Hansen and Stepputat (2001), among others. “The state” can no longer be perceived as a coherent entity devoid of historical and cultural dimensions. Rather, it is examined as a “state-idea,” an ideological construct created to serve specific purposes at specific historical setting, or a “state-system,” a dispersed set of institutional practices and techniques of governance that is continuously in the process of being constituted and contested (Abrams 1988, Hansen and Stepputat 2001).
This panel builds on the development described above. Drawing from ethnographies and historical analysis from different parts of Southeast Asia, the papers in this multi-disciplinary panel examine everyday interactions of ordinary people with state-idea and state-system. Covering both colonial and postcolonial states, this panel interrogates the making of subject/subjectivities and state-idea/state-system as mutually constituted, historically specific, and locally contextualized processes that are teeming with micro-politics. By privileging this vantage point, we hope to contribute a fresh insight from Southeast Asia to new ways of thinking about “the state.”

*) We welcome participation from younger scholars (final year graduate students or recent PhDs). Please send inquiries and abstract submission to Upik Djalins (ud23@cornell.edu).

References
Abrams, Philip. 1988 [1977]. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58-69.

Joseph, Gilbert M and Daniel Nugent. 1994. Everyday Forms of State Formation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat, eds. 2001. States of Imagination, Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics.” American Political Science Review 85(1): 77-96.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1999. “Society, Economy and the State Effects.”In State/Culture State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Edited by George Steinmetz. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. (selective pages)

Steinmetz, George. 1999. “Introduction: Culture and the State” in State/Culture State Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by George Steinmetz, 1-49. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.