Dualism and entanglement in anthropological approaches to statehood

Abstract

Within the discipline of anthropology, the tension between persisting quests for ‘difference’ and historically holistic approaches to interdependence is most evident in current debates on statehood. In various ways, these debates engage with and expand political anthropology’s old concern with the articulation between different forms of politics and social organization. A latent reference point for these debates is the concept of the state as a development away from kin-based, egalitarian societies and towards rational and functional forms of rule. In this article, I examine how the diverse dualisms associated with this view travel across different scholarly settings and are used to articulate various academic and political agendas. This is illustrated by convergence between recent anthropological imaginings of ‘stateless societies’ and the explanations for political order in areas of ‘limited statehood’ sought in international relations. Nevertheless, these notions have been challenged by studies of processes within globally interrelated social histories, structured contingency and the concurrence of diverse logics of action, pointing to the entanglement of kinship, territoriality and other modes of social organization. More significantly still, these approaches provide an alternative way of theorizing dualisms, showing that the difference and autonomy they attribute to particular realms are not given, but produced through relational processes.