This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of ‘the state’. It focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the ‘state’. It promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject. It helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.