Richard Vokes

Preliminary abstract: The ASA/AAS and ASAANZ 2017 conference aims to contribute to, and to significantly extend, recent anthropological discussions regarding the nature of the state. Anthropologists have long been interested both in ‘western’ and in ‘non-western’ states as institutional and bureaucratic formations, as purveyors of nationalist sentiment, and/or as custodians of public ritual. However, in recent years, a growing body of ethnographic work has extended these definitions much further still, by drawing attention to the ways in which ‘statecraft’ may be embedded within even wider sets of relations, representations, and practices as well. The conference aims to explore, and to extend, these recent definitions and debates, and in so doing, to define major new empirical and theoretical directions in which this key area of anthropological discussion may develop in the future.