Thinking beyond the State
Marc Abélès
Translated by Phillip Rousseau, Marie-Claude Haince
"With panache and elegance, Marc Abélès assumes a position of ‘intersectional subjectivity’ to strike a fine balance between ethnographic encounter and theoretical adventure. This book mobilizes a critical political anthropology that makes an important intervention in the shifting scales and states of global power."
Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Director, Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost, Harvard University
"This compact yet magisterial book provides a historically informed, crisp, and interpretively generative exploration of the limitations of state-focused social theory—and of the quite distinctive and subtle contributions anthropological approaches can make in pursuing contemporary understandings of politics, states, and new institutional forms."
Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
" Thinking beyond the State is a compelling analysis — prescient in its critical attention to national states in global contexts, and welcome as a comprehensive statement from a major theorist regarding not only the future of political anthropology but also the future of the idea of a shared world."
Carol J. Greenhouse, author of A Moment’s Notice