During the last few decades, the legitimacy of the study of the state has been challenged both world politically and theoretically (Steinmetz 1999). The first challenge has been related to the process of economic globalization and the intensified global flows of people, capital, commodities, technology, and ideas over and across the borders of nation- states (Sharma and Gupta 2006b; Trouillot 2003). Many researchers have assumed that
20 Yet Das and Poole have argued that despite anthropology’s disciplinary disinterest in state formation, it has been “in many unacknowledged ways, about the state – even when its subjects were constituted as excluded from, or opposed to, the forms of administrative rationality, political order, and authority consigned to the state” (2004: 5).
global market forces, as well as the increasing role of IFIs, development agencies, and transnational corporations, would wither away, or at least seriously challenge, the role of states (Sassen 1996). Indeed, the increasing role of IFIs in national decision-making started to mitigate the “naturalness” of the sovereignty of nation-states worldwide (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 296). Key characteristics of this line of thinking include the idea of deterritorialization: “the disintegration of national borders, and the demise of the nation-state” (Hart 2002: 49). While the state has lost much of its regulatory capacities in the face of global market forces, ethnographic scrutiny of global processes has, however, shown that globalization is manifested, constructed, and negotiated at national and local levels in various complex and mobile ways (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Hart 2002).
Recall, in respect of the theoretical challenge, Foucault (1980), who redirected the theoretical attention from the study of state structures and institutions to the wider functioning of power. This locates us in a different terrain to (neo-)Weberian or (neo-) Marxist understandings of the state that have been dominant within political theories of state formation despite rational-choice theory gaining significance over the years (Steinmetz 1999). Weber perceived sovereign states as holding the monopoly over coercion in given territories. For him, modern Western states represented legal- bureaucratic rationalities, whose formal organizations produce universal outcomes based on technical knowledge, the separation of political and technical spheres, and the compartmentalization of responsibilities at distinct levels of bureaucracy (Weber 2006 [1968]). Indeed, “for neostructuralists, acting on Weberian theoretical foundations, the capitalist state is essentially a benign set of institutions that can act on a more or less rational basis…and the repressive role of the state in reproducing [class] relations are obscured, replaced by an ostensibly non-ideological, rational set of institutions (Webber 2011: 190).
Marx noted in his early works that states produce and govern dominant ideological representations that reproduce capitalist relations (Steinmetz 1999: 13–4). The state, therefore, appears as an alienating, bourgeois instance, a product and maintainer of unequal economic structures and productive relations based on class domination. Therefore, class relations were to be reversed through working class revolutions which would provide total transformations of state and society. Webber (2011: 191) recalls that historical materialists:
[S]ee the state as maintaining capitalist order and regulating social contradictions inherent to capitalism, through violence when necessary. The state does this in the interest of the ruling class, economically and politically, in order to reproduce an inherently unstable and conflict-ridden social environment of class exploitation and struggle, which arises out of the irredeemably contradictory economic interests of the popular versus ruling social classes. Economic exploitation and state repression are built-in, constituent parts of the system of capitalism…
Rational choice theories’ individualist and ruler-centered approach to state formation assumes that social actors “apply the standards of means-ends rationality, that they are self-interested, and that they are largely actuated by a desire for maximizing wealth” (Adams 1999: 100). This view has been dominant in the development discourses of IFIs and donor agencies for the last few decades (Boås and McNeill 2003). There is a large body of classic anthropological critique of the idea of wealth-maximizing individuals, viewed through the notion of reciprocity (see, for example, Godelier 1999; Mauss 2009 [1950]; Sahlins 1972).
All of these approaches differ from Foucault’s notions of the state in which “one moves beyond the image of power as essentially a system of sovereign commands or policies backed by force” (Mitchell 1999: 86). While influenced by Marx, Foucault rejected the idea that unequal productive relations in capitalist economies would be the fundamental – and/or sole – sources of power relations (Jessop 2006: 40).21 On the contrary, Foucault
(2000: 59) suggested that:
[R]ather than looking for the single form, the central point from which all the forms of power would be derived by way of consequence or development, one must first let them stand forth in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, their reversibility: study them therefore as relations of force that intersect, interrelate, converge, or, on the contrary, oppose one another or tend to cancel each other.
This view reflected postmodern skepticism towards scholarly orientations that “claim to have uncovered the fundamental truth about the world” (Smith and Owens 2005: 285). Foucault himself stated that “the attempt to think in terms of a totality has…proved a hindrance to research” (1980: 81). Despite his criticism of historical materialism, however, it has nevertheless been argued that “Foucault maintained a sort of ‘uninterrupted dialogue’ with Marx, [who] was in fact not unaware of the question of power and its disciplines” (Fontana and Bertani 2003: 277; quoted in Jessop 2006: 35). Jessop has defined their relationship by saying that “while Marx seeks to explain the why of capital accumulation and state power, Foucault’s analyses of disciplinarity and governmentality try to explain the how of economic exploitation and political domination” (2006: 42).
Due to its “how” questions, a Foucauldian approach is well suited to ethnographic inquiry. This is one of the first reasons why Foucault’s view of power and politics was
21 Because of his criticism of a priori assumptions of the importance of class domination, Foucault has sometimes been criticized by members and scholars of the political left to which he has responded by stating that “I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so on...None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something... And no doubt fundamentally it concerns my way of approaching political questions” (Foucault 2000: 113).
chosen as a primary theoretical and conceptual framework of this study. It also fits with my methodological interests, because Foucault’s elaborations on power/knowledge encounters have inspired Latin American postcolonial critique. While Foucault’s theories have also been accused of Eurocentrism (a view I am inclined to support) (Clegg et al. 2006: 250–1), the theoretical impetus of the repudiation of absolute truth claims is that it opens up the possibility for alternative local views. Foucault, in fact, called for the emancipation and “reactivation of local knowledges” as opposed to “hierarchical order of power associated with science…[and] the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse” (1980: 85).
Three further theoretical issues convinced me of the utility of Foucault’s ideas of governing and power. First, while Marxist analysis provides tools for understanding and changing external dependencies and exploitation, it does not explain how social change (or power) becomes internalized; an issue which I find crucial if social change is supposed to be maintained over time. The Foucauldian approach of governmentality, on the contrary, focuses both on external structures and internalized forms of power (Mitchell 1999). Because, for Foucault, power is everywhere, it helps us to see that indigenous peoples are not immune to it. They are not solely passive victims of neoliberal imposition of external coercion; rather, they are active agents of change with their own internal contestations, power struggles, and various hierarchies. Second, this understanding of power blurs the boundaries between state and society, thereby enabling an examination of the role played by Bolivian social movements in state centers that is free of the determinist dichotomy of proletarian-run society versus perpetuation of a bourgeois ruling class in the guise of movement activists. Foucault was concerned that the Marxist view of the state as the locus of class struggle was limited and, in fact, hindered the success of revolutionary processes. He (1980: 60) suggested that:
[A]mong all the conditions for…preventing the revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn’t localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed.
Third, Foucault’s views of modern power through the lens of governmentality are compatible with the study of a development apparatus that has played a paramount role in Bolivia’s policy making and state formation over the last few decades, if not longer. In the following, I will explain these views more in detail.