Power, Community, and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organization in Mexico

Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority

“…'The state' may be a very important player even where property claims are hotly contested and actual power relations diffuse, as highlighted by Nuijten's research on issues of private and communal property in Mexico (Nuijten, 2003). According to Mexican law, land belonged to the ejidatarios (communal property owners), but it was effectively controlled by several private land owners.…”

The State as a Battlefield

“…Drawing on ethnography from India, he argues that "we should leave open the analytical question as to the conditions under which the state does operate as a cohesive and unitary whole" (Gupta 1995:229). Nuijten (2003) makes a similar argument when she teases out a duality in the way Mexican peasants both engage with and imagine the state. Power is not an abstract formalized rule, but rather a myriad of changing strategies that are personalized and continuously reinvented (Nuijten 2003:120).…”

“…Power is not an abstract formalized rule, but rather a myriad of changing strategies that are personalized and continuously reinvented (Nuijten 2003:120). At the same time, she argues that governmental techniques such as stamps, maps and official terminology contribute to the preservation of the myth of bureaucratic rule and the appearance of a coherent system (Nuijten 2003).…”

“…Such practices also have the consequence that many state jobs are highly unstable, and people cultivate a range of different connections and networks within the state bureaucracy in order to ensure their future (see also Nuijten 2003). This creates strong and crosscutting alliances within the state system, which people also can rely on in order to get their job done.…”

Introduction

“…Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to how political struggles are grounded in everyday actions-lo cotidiano-in people's face-to-face interactions in their local spaces: markets, workplaces, neighborhoods and local social movements, and in their everyday encounters with state bureaucracy and political representatives (Nuijten 2003;Lazar 2008;Fernandes 2010). One of the anthropological novelties in studies of the state has exactly been to treat everyday practices as state-making in practice.…”