Emerging from the relational stategraphy approach, two recently published monographs offer new impulses for political anthropology and the anthropologies of (post)socialism, Europe and Asia:

André Thiemann. 2024. The Politics of Relations: How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia. New York: Berghahn.

Discussant: Prof. Dr. Andrew Gilbert (Burg Giebichenstein – University of Arts and Design Halle)

Christof Lammer. 2024. Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China. New York: Berghahn.

Discussant: Quirin Rieder (University of Vienna)

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia and China, both books rethink core notions of the anthropology of the state: relations and boundaries. In an innovative combination of otherwise separated relational approaches, Thiemann’s book develops four encompassing axes of research (embeddedness, boundary work, relational modalities, strategic selectivity). Tracing shifting solidarities and the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, it shows how the distribution of resources such as infrastructures, work and care is both embedded in and reshapes the relationship between citizens and state actors. Lammer’s book questions the taken-for-granted notion of blurred boundaries by uncovering the multiplicity of the performed boundaries between state and non-state. Showing how citizen participation in food networks and the administration of social policy signaled Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture for different audiences, it highlights the decisive role of performative boundary work in garnering or losing support for diverse political projects.