Contact zones

Abstract

Much of the recent scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines suggests that attempts to theorize the operations of power under modern capitalism require us to rethink the state as a site of meaning production, emotional investment, and fantasy. But, moreover, as I argue here, modern states are not just imagined or discursive cultural regimes but also embodied forms. Political fields and national spaces have a visual, tactile, sensuous, and emotional dimension: the life of the state has a corporal grounding. My argument is centered on those sensually concrete spaces of power, where the machinations of state and the embodied subject collide: in these zones of contact, the political field assumes a somatosensory gestalt. By a focus on the entanglements of subjectivities, bodies, and states, my essay aims to contribute toward a new cultural analytics of political regimes.