Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State - Akhil Gupta
“Does the ubiquity of the state make it invisible? Or is the relative lack of attention to the state in ethnographic work due to a methodology that” ( Gupta, 1995, p. 211 ) “privileges face-to-face contact and spatial proximity – what one may call a ‘‘physics of presence?’” ( Gupta, 1995, p. 212 ) “Studying the state ethnographically involves both the analysis of the everyday practices of local bureaucracies and the discursive construction of the state in public culture” ( Gupta, 1995, p. 212 ) “it allows the state to be disaggregated by focusing on different bureaucracies without prejudging their unity or coherence.” ( Gupta, 1995, p. 212 ) “problematize the relationship between the translocality of ‘‘the state’’ and the necessarily localized offices, institutions, and practices in which it is instantiated.” ( Gupta, 1995, p. 212 ) “Is it the ‘‘imperialism of categories’’ (Nandy 1990:69) that allows the particular cultural configuration of ‘‘state/civil society’’ arising fr...