Hobbes in Siberia: on the social life of the state

Abstract

How does the state exist in everyday life of its citizens? What are the relations between its institutional forms and ideologies, discourses and imaginaries — all that is called here the culture of ‘everyday statehood'? How does this relationship shed light on an ubiquitous in Russia desire to stay as far from ‘the state' as possible with this culture of statehood, equally ubiquitous and strong? This article considers these questions using a case of Evenki, one of the indigenous peoples of the North that were, on the one hand, subject to systematic paternalistic state policies and, on the other, marked by the state as ‘stateless', existing outside its administrative reach. By drawing on this particular case the goal of this article is to consider theoretical and methodological implications of ethnography of everyday social life of the state.