Reproducing the State
Jacqueline Stevens

Paper | 1999 | $30.95 / £18.95
312 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 table

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

People are said to acquire their affiliations of ethnicity, race, and sex at birth. Hence, these affiliations have long been understood to be natural, independent of the ability of political societies to define who we are. Reproducing the State vigorously challenges the conventional view, as well as post-structuralist scholarship that minimizes state power. Jacqueline Stevens examines birth-based theories of membership and group affiliations in political societies ranging from the Athenian polis, to tribes of Australia, to the French republic, to the contemporary United States. The book details how political societies determine the kinship rules that are used to reproduce political societies.

Stevens analyzes the ways that ancestral and territorial birth rules for membership in political societies pattern other intergenerational affiliations. She shows how the notion of ethnicity depends on the implicit or explicit invocation of a past, present, or future political society. She also shows how geography is used to represent political regions, including continents, as the seemingly natural underpinning for racial taxonomies perpetuated through miscegenation laws and birth certificates. And Stevens argues that sex differences are also constituted through membership practices of political societies. In its chronological and disciplinary range, Reproducing the State will reward the interest of scholars in many fields, including anthropology, history, political science, sociology, women's studies, race studies, and ethnic studies.

Review:

"Stevens has written an imaginative, detailed, and meticulously documented analysis. . . . This is a stimulating book that will reward readers in many disciplines. . . ."--Choice

Endorsement:

"This is the work of an extremely smart, careful, and widely read scholar; it is also well-written and imaginative."--Wendy Brown, University of California, Santa Cruz

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Introduction 3
One The State of Membership 50
Two The Nation and the Tragedy of Birth 102
Three The Semiotics of Nationality: Naming Names 149
Four Race and the State: Male-Order Brides and the Geographies of Race 172
Five Compensatory Kinship Rules: The Mother of Gender 209
Six The Religious Future 236
Conclusion 267
Bibliograpby 281
Index 299

This book has been translated into:

• Turkish

Subject Areas:

• Gender Studies
• Political Philosophy
• Political Science and International Relations

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $30.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01714-3

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £18.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-01714-3

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/19/2008

Questions and comments to: webmaster@press.princeton.edu
Princeton University Press