Personal States
Subtitle: Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: August 3, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780199251797
Subjects: Constitution: government & the state; Political science & theory; Social & cultural anthropology; Social groups & communities; Contemporary Politics - Middle East; Political Science; Sociology; Politics/International Relations; Anthropology - Cultural; Political Process - General; Political Science : Political Process - General; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural; General; History & Theory - General; 1980-; Bureaucracy; Politics and government; Public Opinion; State, The; Turkey; Turkiye Seker Fabrikalar
Description: "Catherine Alexander charts how Turkish people, both within and outside the state bureaucracy, attempt to personalize the impersonality of the state. Based on a detailed study of the nationalized Turkish Sugar Corporation, she considers how people from the highest levels of the state bureaucracy to farming villages understand 'the state', and how, in turn, they imagine themselves to be perceived.

The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the material organization of state factory compounds, state personnel encountered in the course of everyday life, and images of the family structure. By also exploring notions of state and personhood within the highest echelons of the administration itself, Alexander shows how ideas of 'the state' recede once one is actually 'within'. For officials the state becomes other institutions and Ministries with which they have little contact.

The continual process of striving to make connections with other groups and people occurs both at all hierarchical levels of the Sugar Corporation and between farmers and factory engineers." "This ethnography of modernity will cause scholars of state institutions across a broad range of disciplines radically to rethink what 'the state' actually is, and the relations that create it, thus taking understandings of the state to an entirely new level."--BOOK JACKET.