Turning the focus to the everyday, mundane practices of the citizenship has been the central axis along which this thesis on citizenship, statehood and politics in Bodoland is framed, drawing on important work in the anthropology of the state tradition that adopts ethnographic approaches towards routine practices of bureaucracy and politics (Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 2002, Hansen and Stepputat 2001, Das and Poole 2004b, Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005, Sharma and Gupta 2006a, Mathur 2015). In doing so, I follow the pluralist traditions of human and political geography, engaging with other social sciences in “intellectual trading zones” (Barnes and Sheppard 2010) that lead to exciting new forms of knowledge. In particular, I draw on ideas of the anthropology of the state, from within the sub-field of political anthropology. While the overall theoretical underpinnings of the anthropology of the state are important to the formulation of this project, they have been particularly relevant in the research design and methodology. In particular, focussing on everyday negotiations and practices is important to unpack the the idea of the state/citizen boundary as fixed, and instead focus on the less formal acts of citizenship that nonetheless represent claims to political agency.
The anthropology of the state is a vast and rich field, one which saw a revival from the 1990s onwards (Spencer 1997), with a view to understanding how modern forms of authority and sovereignty come to exist. Classical anthropological work on kingship as a form of
sovereignty in “primitive” societies gave way to a more nuanced understanding of modern forms of power, influenced by Foucauldian discourses of the way power is dispersed in society (Hansen and Stepputat 2006). Hansen and Stepputat stress the importance of the ethnographic approach in understanding sovereignty and forms of statehood that account for the persisting idea of the state as a locus of power and authority, even with the ever-growing importance of the market forces as wielding “the most decisive form of citizenship within states” (Ibid., p. 309). Such ideas of dispersed power allow for broader understandings of the practices of citizenship, including through the lens of informality (as seen above), and through questioning the state/society boundary.
In observing the role of the state in effecting transformations, social scientists from across disciplines have drawn a great deal from the Weberian concept of a state as being fixed, autonomous, and with extraordinary power to dominate (Migdal 2001). In the Weberian
tradition, the state is one that successfully claims monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a given territory, but Migdal has argued that while Weber himself qualified the idea of an authoritative entity with the use of the word “successfully”, subsequent authors who have used his ideas have focussed more on the concept of an entity that can legitimately use force (Ibid., pp.13–14), and thus exercise power.
Recent literature on theorising the state through everyday practice has questioned the notion of the state as a fixed, authoritative, well-defined entity. Instead, such scholarship focusses on looking at the state as constantly under construction, while emphasising the importance of studying how it is constructed (Mitchell 1990, Sharma and Gupta 2006a). In a related way, Billig has shown that nationalism and belonging (though he focusses on a Western context) are created through banal practices like the waving of flags, sports, and ways of representing national identity in the media (Billig 1995). Studying the state ethnographically at the
“margins”, in particular, reveals how state practices do not merely reflect regional or cultural specificities of a universal state form, but transform the very nature of the state itself (Das and Poole 2004a).
Looking at the state through its construction prompts questions about the nature of its boundaries — where does the state begin or end? Mundane practices help create the idea of the state as a coherent entity, which is distinct from society. What is important is not to find the boundary between state and society or economy, but to study the processes that make these distinctions appear natural (Mitchell 2006). Questioning the state also means
questioning state power, as Scott has done through his examination of why seemingly well- intended state-initiated schemes fail (Scott 1998). But where Scott looks at the modern state as an exercise in legibility and simplification, Mathur argues in her ethnography in the Indian state of Uttarakhand that state officials themselves are often befuddled, and find the state illegible and unreadable (Mathur 2016). The state’s representations of its intents may appear well-meaning and progressive at one level, but begin to lose coherence as these schemes approach implementation at another (Ibid.).
The image that the state presents of itself may be one of coherence and dominance, but in practice it not only has multiple (and sometimes conflicting) parts, but also pressure (and sometimes support) from groups outside the state, which may wield considerable influence over it (Migdal 2001). The state-society boundary, accepted as somewhat common sense, is
in fact broken down in encounters at the lowest level of the bureaucratic apparatus (Gupta 1995). State authority rests on ideas of verticality, or the idea of state as above family, community, and civil society; and encompassment, of the state as encompassing ever widening units such as localities, regions, and so on (Gupta and Ferguson 2002). These notions are embedded in the everyday practices and representations of the state, particularly through spatial practices that emphasise hierarchies within the governance structure. Rather than looking at space as fundamentally shaping national identities (Kaplan and Herb 2011), this formulation looks at the state itself as shaping and producing spatial hierarchies (Gupta and Ferguson 2002).
Studying the state ethnographically through ordinary practices and interactions is a vital tool in deconstructing states and state effect, especially to understand postcolonial states, and seeing them not just as an imitation of the Western form, but as emerging from their own contexts, and with their own features (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). The postcolonial state has been shaped through particular practices, such as the exercise of state power through the use of spatial techniques like cartography (Radcliffe 2001), or through surveillance, enacted through routine processes of inspection and enumeration (Gupta 2001). Each practice, studied in its unique context, sheds light on how the state is perceived, and its relationship with citizens.
Studying prosaic processes is an ideal method to understand stateness and state effect, and how they are reproduced in everyday life (Painter 2006). Many studies in political geography have also focussed on ethnography and the everyday as a lens from which to understand and critique practices like state violence (Megoran 2006) and state categorisation (Mountz 2003). Ethnographic approaches to the state have been especially crucial in understanding the interactions between culture and state (Marston 2004). Studying everyday practices reveals many nuances about state and nation, including the contradictions between what is sometimes envisioned by the state as a practice of citizenship, how it transpires on the ground, and how it is reinforced or challenged by non-state actors.
From within this field of the anthropology of the state, the most pertinent questions for this project emerge from works dealing with the intersection of state and citizenship, and how studying the everyday state can reveal ideologies of inclusion, exclusion and belonging. Recent work in political anthropology has also turned towards citizenship as an important
lens from which to frame the anthropology of politics, moving beyond understanding citizenship as a legal right, and considering political belonging more expansively (Lazar 2013, Lazar and Nuijten 2013). Much of the work from the tradition of political anthropology look at forms of insurgent and activist citizenship (Holston 2008, 2009, Das 2011), how forms of insurgency and activism question the very basis of citizenship, especially in heavily militarised contexts (Kikon 2009, Shah 2013), and meaning-making and construction of citizenship through political processes (Banerjee 2014, Mitchell 2014, Piliavsky 2014a). This focus, on informality and acts of citizenship as being key drivers through which spaces of citizenship are claimed, is an important focus of this project.
In this thesis I examine everyday practices of citizenship primarily through state actors who mediate access to the state for citizens, through ordinary acts of engaging with the state (for instance, transfers of land, voting, and welfare projects). In looking at encounters at the lowest levels of governance, where the state is often most viscerally felt, the focus in this study is on state actors at the village level. In Bodoland’s case, this includes political actors that blur into the state apparatus. A growing focus on the everyday state, and the daily negotiations between citizens and the state has enabled the “messy yet vibrant sphere” (Berenschot and van Klinken 2018 p. 96) of the informal politics of citizenship, with its brokers, fixers, and informal networks to truly emerge in scholarship. In Bodoland, this informality is folded into the formal structure through these hybrid political/government appointments. Ad-hoc schedules, irregular meetings, and the lack of “official” government spaces or structures at this level give new meaning to the “everydayness” of local politics, while also providing rich opportunities to understand it in greater detail.