Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 1 No.

2 June 1988
ISSN 0952-1909

ISSUES AND AGENDAS

Beyond The Fringe: The Nation State,

Colonialism, and The Technologies of
Power*

BERNARD S . COHN AND NICHOLAS B. DIRKS

In the pre-modern state, power was made visible through signs

displayed in the form of theater, with processions, progresses, royal
entries, coronations and funerals, and rituals which guaranteed the
well-being and continued power of the rulers (and their dominant
relations to the ruled). The theater of power required varied forms of
knowledge, historical, mythical, cosmological, ritual. This
knowledge was maintained and formalized by specialists: priests,
historians, bards, architects, sculptors, artists, ritual preceptors,
and scribes. The European states made their power visible not only
through ritual performance and dramatic display, but through the
gradual extension of ‘officializing’procedures and routines, through
the capacity to bound and mark space. to record transactions such
as the sale of property, to count and classify their populations, to
gradually replace religious institutions as the registrar of the life-
cycle facts of birth, marriage, and death, and finally to become the
natural embodiment of history, territory, and society.
The ‘invention’of the nation state in eighteenth-century Europe
went hand-in-hand with the construction of a new form of civil
society. Civil society was to free ‘individuals’in new and progressive
societies from ‘traditional’modes of social organization and from the
myriad constraints of pre-modern and/or feudal polities. Civil
society has been constituted by and institutionalized in a range of
bodies - the church, education, civic organizations - which represent
the interests of a private domain, interests construed now to be
autonomous from the state (even as they are simultaneously
protected by the state). In the retrospective histories of modem
nation states, it was assumed that although the outward reach of the
pre-modern state was limited by political, military, and technological
 Agendas 225

constraints, the inward (or downward) reach of the state had been
virtually unlimited. The modem state, more powerful than ever
before, legitimated itself in part through its claim to free the social
from the political intrusion of the past.
In eighteenth century Europe, allegiances came increasingly to be
conceptualized in terms of verticalities associated with bounded
territoriality and shared pasts: local hierarchies were replaced by
what Benedict Anderson has termed ‘imagined communities’. The
sociopolitical realignments leading to the nation state as the
predominant European social formation was based upon the
invention of social technologies, printing and the standardization of
languages, nationalizing education, self-regulating and
autonomous legal systems, official histories of the state, and the
production and celebration of national shrines, symbols, and
pilgrimages centers (what Althusser called at a different theoretical
moment the ideological state apparatuses). The legitimizing of the
nation state proceeds not only in the public enactment of its self-
defined traditions, but by constant reiteration of its power through
what have become accepted as natural (rational and normal) state
functions, of certlfymg, counting, reporting, registering, classifymg,
and identifymg. The documentation and certification projects of the
state have become naturalized as the fundamental activities and
legimitate provenance of the modem state.
Modem state formation, Corrigan and Sayer have recently argued,
was and continues to be a cultural project embodied in ‘therepertoire
of rituals and routines of rule through which legitimized powers and
authorized modes of control organize some of the most fundamental
divisions, which become part of the media of modernity’ (Corrigan
and Sayer: 6-7).By the media of modernity they refer to overt and
covert state projects, which seek to produce moralized, civilized,
rational, sensible, patriotic, productive, responsible, obedient, law
abiding citizens. The instrumentalities range from the obvious, the
central role of schools and its routines and objects, the expansion of
state power to officialize domestic acts, to mark and define
marriages, to establish an official definition of home, to control the
location and nature of work.
The legitimation project is both constituted and represented by the
forms of knowledge the state creates, accumulates, and organizes to
mark and measure the health, wealth and welfare of its citizens. One
need only think of the massive amounts of documentation which, to
take an example we know well, the 19th and 20th century British
state at home and in India produced, in the form of reports,
investigations, commissions, and the compilation, storage, and
publication of statistical data on finance, trade, health, demography,
crime, education, transportation, agriculture, and industry.
226 Issues and Agendas

Historians have been aware of this documentation because it made

possible the new social history of the last quarter century. Recent
trends in history have meant that the older concern with the normal
activities of the state has increasinglygiven way to concern with state
activities in the control of the marginal: the criminal, the insane, and
the dispossessed. But until recently the source material has been
read as both natural and neutral, neither as a crucial component in
the totalizing project of the state nor as a corpus (canon)of texts (i.e.
cultural-political documents) requiring as much exegetical and
hermeneutical skill as the reading of a Sanskrit text. The state
documentation project is both totalizing and individualizing. It
participates in the constitution of social categories and identities
(educated, uneducated, rich, poor, male, female, young, old), it
marks off religions, languages, customs, and ethnic groups, and it
implies various forms of hierarchies which are officially recognized.
It also individualizes and controls through such seemingly neutral
activities as assigning census numbers, birth and marriage
certificates, draft cards, drivers' licenses. Finger printing, which has
come to be used worldwide as the 'scientific' means of identifying an
individual, was first utilized for this purpose in India by the colonial
government in Bengal.
The determination, codification, control and representation of the
past have also been central to the establishment of the nation state.
And here again we have witnessed the implication of colonialism in
the project of the nation state, for not only did empire provide the
basis and ground of European domination, it also worked through
its own negativities. to reproduce itself after its own demise. It is
ironic that the twentieth century, which has seen so many radical
breaks with the past (and in which the future itself is in doubt), has
been marked by the production of so many new histories. With the
establishment of each 'new' nation out of the old European colonial
order, each has to be equipped with an official history of its
precolonial past and its freedom struggle.
And it is not only on the fringes of the old imperial orders, but at
their centers as well, that 'new' histories have had to be made, as
more and more actors within the historically defined nation state
contest their previously assigned roles on the fringes of public
political life, through the construction of histories. As previously
marginalized groups and categories within the state make the
passage from the shadow of domination to enfranchisement in
public political spaces they become constituted as historical actors.
These passages, for the formally colonized, are neither easy nor
uncontested. The task as we see it therefore is to decompose the easy
(historical) relation between the state and history, to demonstrate
that too often agency has been constituted as an historical force
 Issues and Agendas 227

through the invisible mediation of the state and civil society.

Our project is in part an attempt to link histories of power and
anthropologies of culture. Civil society and the modem state, born
at the same time as anthropology, and using the new disciplinary
project to service its claims to national pasts and world power, have
always signalled the limits of anthropological provenance and
possibility. Civil society is the end of anthropology, the demise of the
social. Or so until recently the matter has rested. At the heart qf our
project is the claim that this conceit must be radically deconstructed.
We read the nation state as having played a critical role in the
invention of the very social modalities which it sought then to
represent as free and autonomous; and we read civil society as the
prelude to a new kind of socio-cultural production and a new scale
of political intrusion. Civil society is not only therefore produced by
a new kind of dialectical relation between ideally defined and
distinguished poles of state and society, but a teleologically
constructed representation of society as autonomous and natural.
Ironically, ‘the most powerful ability of the state to coerce [. . .] has
come to reside in the restrictive concepts of the person, the body, the
family, gender, and the consignment of all of these to a
voluntaristically-conceived sphere of the private . . . ’ (O’Hanlon,
private communication). Ironically also, this modem ‘liberation’of
the social occupies an interesting relation to the development of
social science. For, as society has been separated and freed from the
state, social science (the handmaiden of the documentation and
certification project) has claimed that society must simultaneously
be subjected to scientific study, which itself has the purpose and
function of control and manipulation. A combination of paradoxes
conspire to make the tentacles of state power (and related forms of
state knowledge) appear to be discrete, disinterested, and diffuse;
but we believe this to be illusion.
We are heirs to an anthropological tradition which insists that
culture is opposed to nature, that what in any given society is ‘taken
for granted or ‘common sense’ is that which is most in need of
interpretation and explanation. This is not to say that we uncritically
accept the way many anthropologists have posited culture as a
fundamentally non-political domain, for what interests us is
precisely how culture is produced, controlled, transformed, and
reproduced. Although an anthropological agenda committed to
‘practice’is part of our proposal, we insist that ‘culture’ be inserted
into a larger historical program of interpretation and analysis than
implied in current formulations about practice, that ‘habitus’ is
generated not only out of small scale networks of practice but also
out of the legitimation project of the state. Thus we seek to analyze
culture in relation to the history of the nation state. But we do not
228 Issues and Agendas

discard certain anthropological (Durkheimian) notions about

culture, that it is systems of symbols and norms that are (forthe most
part) shared (i.e. not only self-consciously and self-interestedly
promulgated by a narrow elite) and that it permeates ways of living,
thinking, and even feeling. An historical and critical anthropology of
culture permits a new and rich entry into a field of debate previously
oriented around the great divide between those who stress ‘ideology’
(Althusser) and those who use various definitions of ‘culture’ to
scrutinize cultural production (Williams)or the cultural autonomy of
subordinate groups (Thompson).
This is not to say that ‘culture’should get a free ride. At one level,
we recognize that culture is a ‘material’force, and as such can not
be analyzed apart from its relation to the interests and identities of
ruling classes and institutions. But in so f a r as culture is implicated
in state projects in some of the ways described above, we challenge
those claims about determination and reflexivity that depend upon
economistic epistemologies. Again, this is not to say that culture
should be treated either as anonymous or as consensual. Agents are
involved both in the production and reproduction of culture: and
agents can resist and contest cultural forms. Gramsci’s use of the
term hegemony reflects these inbuilt tensions, ambivalences, and
dialectics. As Comgan and Sayer have written, building on the
insights of Gramsci, ‘hegemonyis not self-securing,it is constructed,
sustained, reconstructed, by particular agents and agencies, in part
by violence’. Culture (like history) is and can be contested: but at
another and more fundamental level culture is the abstraction of
discursive and institutional sites which contain contest, define its
antipodes, seal its interpretations, and configure its possible
resolutions. The state thus deploys cultural hegemony through
paradoxical forms of preemption and deferred power.
Culture is thus recuperated precisely through rescuing its political
moment; through an historicist reading of culture not just as some
abstract ‘construction,’not just as somethingwhich is at some level
arbitrary rather than natural, but a particular conglomerate of
constructions set in motion by agents, operationalized through the
agencies of the state, contested through institutional means that
themselves have been naturalized through the very project of state
formation. And this is the heart of our proposal, that we explore how
the modem state secures its cultural legitimation through its
refracted technologies of control and self-constitution, through its
claim ‘by its very name to be the legitimate and legitimizing focus of
loyalty and focus of authority’(Comgan and Sayer, p.9), and through
the naturalized extensions of this claim in the strategies of
documentation, certification, and democratic rule.
The political moment of culture that interests us particularly is
 Issues and Agendas 229

that embedded in the history of colonialism. Colonialism played an

active role in the cultural project of legitimation and in the
technological development of new forms of state power. Colonialism
has also left active legacies in the form of the modal Western states,
in the constitution ofpostcolonial relations between the West and the
third world, and in the new histories and states that have been
constructed in the twentieth century. Colonialism is too important
a subject to be relegated either to the history of nineteenth century
Europe on the one hand or to the negative nationalisms of third world
studies on the other. Thus we seek to bring together students of
different parts of the colonial elephant in order to further a discourse
about the totality of differences in the colonial project. Part of our
task is to propose the extent to which the European experience of
state formation was predicated on its own colonial experience, and
in turn how nationalism as response to colonial experience
reproduced (though with crucial differences) the European
experience. Part of our task is also to critique the orientalism implicit
in the use of the third world either as case study for precapitalist
modes of production or the dependent relations of capitalism. But
these goals and others rest on the assumption that a serious
treatment of the cultural project of state formation entails a
consideration of the world relations that we believe have been
instrumental in the production of the modern nation states in which
all of us live today. Serious and interdisciplinary scrutiny of this
cultural project is vital to the development of a significant discourse
within and between history, anthropology, and critical theory,

Notes
%is position paper set the agenda for the Mellon Symposium in
Historical Anthropology, second session, at the California Institute of
Technology, May 1987. The theme of the Symposium was ‘Culture and
colonialism: deployments of power and resistance’. The Conigan and Sayer
paper referred to here (‘From the body politic to the national interest‘) was
given at that meeting: so were the papers by Jean and John Comaroff, and
h a Maria Alonso, published in JHSVol. 1 No. 1.

Editorial Note

Philip Abrams ‘Noteson the Difficultyofstudying the State’(1 977)published

in JHS Vol. 1 No. 1, is also a highly relevant text.