Originally published: Chicago: Aldine Pub.Co., 1974.

The contemporary nation-state is popular in that it rests upon mutual identification between rulers and ruled. Such identification is based upon common primordial qualities that are felt to be ancient, inherent, given, however new they may in fact be: language, territory, culture, race. But the nation-state has also produced far more rigorous authoritarianisms and frequently less tolerance than old empires. Anthropology, the -study of man, - for all the immodesty of its name, has concerned itself almost exclusively with people in small groups: bands, tribal segments, village communities, and, recently, urban neighborhoods, schools, and work places. Social anthropology has been the science of the socio-cultural microcosm and has developed a method and style of inquiry appropriate to this task. This volume uniquely applies the techniques of social anthropology to the study of the nation-state. This discussion of states and their microcosms does not simply celebrate social anthropological research and the understanding it yields, but also illustrates its contribution, in combination with other modes of investigation, to the understanding of contemporary international issues. In particular, Fallers says it is necessary to place the microcosms historically, for those who inhabit them act within history as experienced, both directly by themselves and, at further remove, by their predecessors and contemporaries. This classic volume offers a different perspective for understanding international issues.

The contemporary nation-state is popular in that it rests upon mutual identification between rulers and ruled. Such identification is based upon common primordial qualities that are felt to be ancient, inherent, given, however new they may in fact be: language, territory, culture, race. But the nation-state has also produced far more rigorous authoritarianisms and frequently less tolerance than old empires. Anthropology, the -study of man, - for all the immodesty of its name, has concerned itself almost exclusively with people in small groups: bands, tribal segments, village communities, and, recently, urban neighborhoods, schools, and work places. Social anthropology has been the science of the socio-cultural microcosm and has developed a method and style of inquiry appropriate to this task. This volume uniquely applies the techniques of social anthropology to the study of the nation-state. This discussion of states and their microcosms does not simply celebrate social anthropological research and the understanding it yields, but also illustrates its contribution, in combination with other modes of investigation, to the understanding of contemporary international issues. In particular, Fallers says it is necessary to place the microcosms historically, for those who inhabit them act within history as experienced, both directly by themselves and, at further remove, by their predecessors and contemporaries. This classic volume offers a different perspective for understanding international issues.

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture. The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

Hybrids of Modernity considers the relationship between three Western modernist institutions: anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition, in particular examining the emergence of culture as a commodity.

En analyse af forholdet mellem etnicitet, klasse, socialt køn og nationalt tilhørsforhold og med tanker om fremtidsudsigterne.