The king yields to the village? A micropolitics of statemaking in Northwest Vietnam

Using ethnography and assemblage theory in political geography

“…This focus on the everyday has also been brought into play with some philosophical excursions (that assemblage theorists later build on). Particularly, the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ – or the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Swyngedouw, 2011: 372) – has shed light on the self‐validating practices of some states (Lentz, 2014; McConnell, 2013). These scholars have opened politics to entwine the formal to the informal, the rational to the emotional, and the state to the everyday, without using assemblages.…”

Political geography II: Institutions

“…Considerable attention goes to translocal mobilization: the connections of corporate and civil society actors and the extraterritorial practices of the state. The effect is two-fold: to highlight the fractured and performative character of state power and to show the spatiality of that power beyond the familiar territorial frames (Koch, 2017; Lentz, 2014; Ragazzi, 2014; Steinberg and Kristoffersen, 2017).…”

Development, Citizenship, and Everyday Appropriations of Buen Vivir: Ecuadorian Engagement with the Changing Rhetoric of Improvement

“…In community meetings, particular men tend to position themselves as formal and informal leaders through their expressions of technical and legal knowledge, as well as official discourses, demonstrating linguistic skills for engaging with state actors. As geographer Christian Lentz (: 9) writes, learning ‘languages of rule’ enables local leaders to ‘navigate and negotiate […] historically‐layered power relations’. In Playas, such leaders are the individuals most often selected to go on commissions to the provincial capital and to Quito to engage with state actors and present demands for resources and they are also often among the handful of men who are elected to local leadership positions.…”

“…An extensive literature exists on the anthropology of the state (Tsing, ; Hansen and Stepputat, ) and state formation in the Andes (Krupa and Nugent, ) and elsewhere (Abrams, ; Sivaramakrishnan, ; Migdal, ; Lentz, ) that documents relations in which people at the margins of the state appropriate state idioms. In fact, over the last two decades or so, such critical literature has often posited that the social and historical existence of the state depends on the fact that people appropriate and propagate state idioms and concepts, such as the very concept of a national scale (Mitchell, ).…”