What happens when a seemingly rational state becomes paranoid and delusional? The Encrypted State engages in a close analysis of political disorder to shed new light on the concept of political stability. The book focuses on a crisis of rule in mid-20th-century Peru, a period when officials believed they had lost the ability to govern and communicated in secret code to protect themselves from imaginary subversives. The Encrypted State engages the notion of sacropolitics—the politics of mass group sacrifice—to make sense of state delusion. Nugent interrogates the forces that variously enable or disable organized political subjection, and the role of state structures in this process. Investigating the role of everyday cultural practices and how affect and imagination structure political affairs, Nugent provides a greater understanding of the conditions of state formation, and failure.
Tabela de Conteúdo
Introduction: The Routine and the Remarkable in State Formation
1. Sacropolitics
2. The Descent into Madness
3. The Consolidation of Casta Rule
4. Being (and Seeing) Like a State
5. Divided Elite and Disordered State
6. The Sacropolitics of Military Conscription
7. The Sacropolitics of Labor Conscription
8. Glimpses of Danger and Subversion
Conclusion: Behind the Mask of the State
Sobre o autor
David Nugent is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. His previous books include
Locating Capital in Time and Space (SUP, 2002) and
Modernity at the Edge of Empire (SUP, 1997).
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