Matters of State: Bureaucracy, Procedure, and Power in South Asia

How does ‘the state’ generate material force in everyday life? Over the last four decades, scholars of South Asia have invigorated theorization of the state by resituating Eurocentric accounts in an imperial and postcolonial frame. In recent years, scholars have foregrounded the materiality of state-making by examining the bureaucratic circulation of archival records, minoritized subjects’ encounters with law, the remaking of bodily norms through colonial institutions, transnational flows of aid and expertise, and interplays of routine and exception in governance.

“Matters of State” will bring together scholarship that builds on these exciting, interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualize the paradoxes of state power in South Asia.

Keynote: “Murderous Looks: The Government of Big Cats in India” Nayanika Mathur (University of Oxford)

Co-sponsored by the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India; Center for Human Values; Humanities Council; Center for the Study of Religion; Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice; Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities; Department of Religion; Department of Art and Archaeology; Department of English; Department of Anthropology