Anthropologist, state, empire and ‘tribe’ — Part-2 on February 19, 2019Historians mark the 19th century as the era of ‘nationalisms’ because it witnessed the emergence of the nation-state, organized around the themes of consolidation of new political identities and territories that signified the formation of geographically-defined markets and currencies. Richard Griggs (1992) states that ‘France’s claim to being a nation, or even a nation-state, was […]
Anthropologist, state, empire and ‘tribe — Part-1 on February 18, 2019Over the past century, a number of anthropologists and related social scientists have written about the formation of state societies and their relation to peripheral peoples who find themselves bounded by states, usually without their consent. Very often, such ‘peripheral’ peoples come to our attention in relation to wars, usually not of their own making. […]