Introduction: Building an Anthropology of the State in Latin America

Abstract

This article introduces the dossier on building an Anthropology of the State in Latin America by critically examining classical notions of the State, sovereignty, and evolutionary typologies that have shaped the Social Sciences since the nineteenth century and have functioned as tools of representation and colonial domination. Drawing on the works of Foucault, Wolf, Wallerstein, Scott, Bourdieu, Abrahams, and Mitchell, the authors argue for understanding the State as a historical assemblage of practices, relations, and effects manifested in everyday life rather than as a fixed and autonomous structure. In a regional context marked by the rise of a Permanent State of Exception, the securitization of social life, and the weakening of rights-based frameworks, the dossier calls for ethnographic research that explores how the State is experienced, negotiated, and contested in Indigenous territories, urban neighborhoods, public policies, punitive practices, and emerging political projects, presenting five studies that address these issues across diverse Latin American settings.