Blurred Boundaries: the Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State (Translated from English by Budzinskiy Stanislav S., Kirpichnikov Ivan A.) | Sibirskie Istoricheskie Issledovaniia – Siberian Historical Research. 2023. № 1. DOI: 10.17223/2312461X/39/3

Blurred Boundaries: the Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State (Translated from English by Budzinskiy Stanislav S., Kirpichnikov Ivan A.)

In this article I attempt to do an ethnography of the state by examining the discourses of corruption in contemporary India. I focus on the practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy in a small north Indian town as well as on representations of the state in the mass media. Research on translocal institutions such as “the state” enables us to reflect on the limitations of participant-observation as a technique of fieldwork. The analysis leads me to question Eurocentric distinctions between state and civil society and offers a critique of the conceptualization of “the state” as a monolithic and unitary entity.

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Keywords

state, public culture, fieldwork, discourse, corruption, India

Authors

Name	Organization	E-mail
Gupta Akhil	University of California

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