Anthropological studies on the Everyday State [primarily see Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1991; Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Das and Poole 2004] have debunked the Weberian rational-legal mode of seeing the state as a rigid, compartmentalised, hierarchical authority and instead have encouraged us to view the state as emerging through the enmeshing of socio-cultural nodes of power and institutional opportunity structures. Political anthropologists [Banerjee 2022, Kamra 2016, and James 2011] have highlighted how the state in the everyday emerges and works through negotiations between governments, local patrons, intermediaries, and citizens. Expanding on the liberal, Gramscian and Foucauldian imaginations of the State, even urban studies scholars (eg. Benjamin 2008) and political scientists (see Auerbach and Thachil 2018) have focused on the real-time workings of the Everyday State. They have brought to the fore how the Everyday State brings in place a heterodox associational-clientelist politics that navigates through the emotive aspects of politics and banal realities of institutional processes. Building on recent scholarship within anthropology and beyond, this panel seeks to map the emerging theoretical and methodological challenges in studying the Everyday State, and unpack its socio-cultural and spatial-scalar contours.
We encourage conceptually driven and/or empirically grounded papers that reflect on the Everyday State through ethnographies and case studies. We are especially interested in how citizens’ agency and subjectivities shape the state.
Some questions that will guide the discussion are:
#How is the Everyday State constituted in a given context?
# How does the heterogeneity of citizens’/ subjects’ political agency unpack the Everyday State?
# How does the spatiality of the Everyday State reinvent the repertoire of identity politics?
# How do we theorise the Everyday State today?
