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• Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.
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• Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
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• Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

"[Sharma and Gupta] have compiled a timely, useful and dense collection of classical and more recent texts that cover the field, as I know it, pretty well." (Critique of Anthropology, 2009)

"The volume presents an innovative and greatly needed introduction to an interdisciplinary research programme between anthropology and political science." (Discourse & Society, February 2008)

"[This) volume's refreshing theoretical approach and range of empirical examples should make it a valuable teaching and reference book for all those concerned with the challenging questions posed by the state." (Political Studies Review)

Aradhana Sharma is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Wesleyan University.

Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. His previous publications include Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (ed. 1997), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (ed. 1997), Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (1998), and Caste and Outcast (ed. 2002).