“Empires, Nations, and Natives is a refreshing collection, notable for the quality and depth of research into different ‘national anthropologies’ in Europe, the Americas, and South Africa, and for the ability of the authors and editors to bring out the linkages among such intellectual traditions. The book provokes important reflections on questions of empire, colonialism, cultural difference, democratic government, and the possibilities and constraints of the nation-state.”—Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, New York University, and author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History “Empires, Nations, and Natives reflects an original conception of the ethnography of politics, attending imaginatively to the ethnographic and theoretical contexts in which anthropology sometimes enters (and sometimes eludes) the fields of political identity, agency, and change. It is also a valuable critical supplement to state theory.”—Carol Greenhouse, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University, and coeditor of Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change “[T]his volume is an important contribution to contemporary debates over the part anthropology plays in the public sphere of nation-states. Its broad range highlights the international connections between empires and nation-states as well as between imperial and national anthropologies. It is a necessary reference for those interested in the intellectual and political history of our discipline from an anthropological perspective, for those interested in the anthropology of knowledge, and for those engaged in the critique of the postcolonial forms of neo-colonialism.”
Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology