had this been written with greater lucidity and with greater attention to the internal

texture of the Bengali experience.

LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi

Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in

South Asia. Cambridge: University Press, 2007. 203 pp. d45 (hbk), d15.99 (pbk).

In this addition to the ‘New Departures in Anthropology’ series, Jonathan Spencer

presents an accessible analysis of violence, politics and the state in Sri Lanka, India and

Nepal. The author sets himself the ambitious brief of conceptually reuniting individual

agency with the state; arguing that the cultural and the political, like the state and its

citizenry, are mutually reinforcing. In so doing, Spencer variously builds upon and

critiques the contributions of sub-alternism and classic political anthropology to the topic.

In the opening sections of the book, Spencer makes a swift but incisive inventory of

the past 30 years of political anthropology, finding the field to be somewhat lacking.

The author does a good job of deconstructing the sometimes limiting frameworks of a

number key thinkers on the subject; arguing that the eagerness to invest politics into

‘stateless’ societies has led the discipline, to its detriment, to draw focus away from the

study of the state in favour of instrumentality.

Spencer advances his critique by arguing that subaltern history has conversely

accorded the state a position of analytic privilege that is to the detriment of its

understanding of agency and culture. In a refutation of Ranajit Guha’s model of the

state as ‘external despot’ (p. 102), Spencer argues that the state is not clearly bounded

from its citizenry and that its members furthermore make a great deal of moral

investment in their perceived membership of it. Taking some analytic cues from Akhil

Gupta’s analysis of corrupt petty bureaucrats in North India, Spencer posits that the

boundaries between individuals, civil society and the state must instead be approached

as essentially ‘porous’ (p. 114).

Spencer’s analysis is removed from both the stateless face of political anthropology

and the faceless state of subalternism. The book therefore locates its ‘politics and the

state’ in the subjectivity of everyday life, drawing upon acts of public violence, rallies,

elections and celebrations that elicit strong sentiments for those that experience them:

‘The politics I encountered in Sri Lanka, and which I want to talk about in this book, is

a politics of semiotic excess, of transgression, of occasional violence, of humour and

entertainment, love and fear’ (p. 15).

Indeed, the strength of the book is Spencer’s location of the political in the

everyday, with his analysis being built from the ground up with solid and vividly

presented ethnography, rather than the more cohesive theoretical and/or political

agendas that define the work of his predecessors.

In addition to drawing extensively upon fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka since the

1980’s, Spencer engages well with a good range of contemporary (especially British)

research on India. However, while Spencer succeeds in usefully integrating the insights

of Indianists into his work, if this wider sub-continental approach is to be as profitable

as it might be, then what the book is notably lacking is a discussion of Naxalism. In a

broad and well argued work on the interactions between violence, politics, the state

and citizenry, the lack of attention given to popular Maoist uprising in India is an

r The authors 2009. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2009

Book Reviews 555

unfortunate oversight that could only have served to enrich the analysis. More cynical

researchers may similarly find references to Indian politicians such as Laloo Prasad

Yadav to be lacking in a discussion of corruption and/or regional organised crime.

However, some (admittedly Indianist) oversights aside, this book is an accessible

and well written contribution to South Asian studies and political anthropology more

generally. Spencer’s writing style and the clarity and persuasiveness of his analysis

make this broadly conceived work a valuable contribution to the field.

ANDREW SANCHEZ

London School of Economics

r The authors 2009. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2009

556 Book Reviews