A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 500 pp.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics mirrors not merely a narrowly defined subfield-political anthropology-but much that is current in social and cultural anthropology and, in fact, in social sciences and cultural and international studies, generally.

Here is a list of chapter subjects: affective states, socialism, AIDS, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, development, displacement, feminism, gender, race and class, genetic citizenship, global city, globalization, governing states, hegemony, human rights, identity, nations, intrapolitics, mafias, militarization, neoliberalism, popular justice, postcolonialism, power topographies, race technologies, sovereignty, transnationality, civil society. The range is wide, the quality high, the scholarship sound, the writing for the most part lucid. The Companion is to be recommended as a compendium of current thinking by accomplished anthropologists about timely issues and concepts, especially in relation to ethnographic approaches.

What questions might, then, be raised? My primary focus is to delineate and locate the guiding paradigm. This must be done inductively; the editors do so only briefly, perhaps relying on the text this companion accompanies...