The State and the Self

Abstract

Corbridge (2007) uses this evocative scene to argue that even small changes in the way marginal people engage with the state can be significant. It is an encounter with the state in which the widow is positioned not only as subordinate and inferior but also as a citizen. She draws upon the discursive resources that comprise the practice of collecting her entitlement, not only to govern her action, but in ways that can inform her understanding of self. Studies about the affective and emotional force of the state (Cody 2009; Navaro-Yashin 2012) suggest that the documents she holds, the atmosphere of the encounter may affect her in other, more subtle ways. Many can attest to the sense of satisfaction that a successful encounter with Indian bureaucracy brings,² and perhaps affected in this way, the widow feels a sense of achievement, walks out a little taller. I agree with Corbridge (2007) that such changes in encounters with the state hold significance, including, I would add, for new possibilities for self.

Consider a widow who goes to the post office or Block Development Office in Jharkhand (eastern India) to collect her pension. She will expect to be kept waiting in a queuing system that privileges rank over rights. She will expect to be spoken to roughly by a state official. She might even expect to make a small payment to one or more official to get what should be hers by right. But she will also have legitimate expectations of the state&. [Receiving] the pension she has a sense of her rights as a citizen, and she will sometimes express herself to a government official in terms of a language of rights or of civil society.

(Corbridge 2007: 196)