State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule eds. by Christopher Krupa and David Nugent (review)

State Theory and Andean Politics is a welcome contribution to the ethnography of historical and contemporary processes of state formation in the Andes. Cast as a critique of the “state realism” that “affords the state the status of an objective, empirical fact” (9), the editors offer three central points: 1) returning to Abrams (1988), that the “state” effect does not reflect a unified thing, but should be studied critically as an assemblage of self-naturalizing representational practices aimed at “legitimating the illegitimate” (12); 2) that these practices unfold through specific projects and processes of aggregation (that connect and unify otherwise unconnected actors and objects) and projection (through which everyday encounters are conjured into domains of power that transcend the immediate); and 3) that state affects play a key role in the state effect, through the “affective relationships” that people maintain with the state (15). Following prior anthropologies of the state and state formation, the authors deploy ethnographic and historical method to explore these themes in “off-centered” sites.

Section 1, with chapters by María Clemencia Ramírez, Nicole Fabricant, and Lesley Gill, offers rich ethnographic engagement with the (un)making of the state in contexts of political conflict. Here we see that the critique of state realism does not imply the dismissal of empirical facts, but rather entails an empirical unpacking of modalities of violence and the exercise of economic power that underlie the façade of state-ness in Colombia and Bolivia. In Colombia, as Gill and Ramírez detail, paramilitaries, oil companies, unions, and grassroots movements vie—on unequal terrain usually dominated by men with guns—for the definition and maintenance of (il) legitimate order. In Bolivia, the collapse of the neoliberal state paved the way for new affect-laden hopes for a more progressive state order. Against this hopefulness, regional elites, backed by local and transnational capital, nurtured their own affective urges. These state affects combined a racist disgust with Indianness and a desire for a whiter political order. In both countries, state effects unfolded through regional particularities situated in quite real contests waged by bodies, money, and bullets.

Section 2 explores “off-centered” morphologies of the Ecuadoran state. Chris Krupa examines how the attempt to tax is a core modality of state-making, an “outreach” device that is a key “performative technology of rule” (99). Taxation confronts varied modes of resistance and distinctly positioned sentiments and understandings of the state. Outcomes of taxation practices reveal the durability of the state idea as a shared terrain of ongoing struggle between differently positioned actors. Equally durable are underlying relations of power rooted in colonial hierarchies of race, property, and class. Kim Clark and Mercedes Prieto follow more historical tacks. Clark examines the deployment of public health initiatives in highland Ecuador, arguing that new administrative practices served to constitute a state “effect” even as these were contested and negotiated on the ground. Prieto uses a similar method to explore how state functionaries imagined rural “problems” through their own imaginaries about the nature of indigenous women. In turn, functionaries deployed policies built on these illusions, making the imagined Indian woman and family into a vehicle for “public incursion” into indigenous communities. Prieto does a compelling job of examining the intersections of race and sexuality—and the delusions and imaginaries that these categories mobilize in mestizo and criollo functionaries—that are at the heart of historical and contemporary modalities of rule in the Andes.

Section 3 offers an examination of the role of affect and emotion, or, as it were, delusion and suspicion, in state-making practice. David Nugent, also taking a historical turn, details core contradictions at the heart of statecraft in mid-20th century Peru. State efforts at labor conscription failed because of empirical demographic realities of labor shortage. Yet these failures were explained away through largely imaginary stories about Indians, corruption, and APRA terrorism. A...