The National Body

Ann Anagnost

Department of Anthropology

University of Washington

In registering a “difference” between nationalisms then and now (from developmental to cultural nationalism), I would like to approach the question from the perspective of the “raison d’état” and how this may have changed in the last quarter century with the displacement of the social by the economic. In other words the reason of state has shifted from what Foucault phrased for the disciplinary state as being “for the benefit of the people as a whole” to the imperative to “grow” the economy in ways that produces social inequality (“social inequality is ‘good’ for society” as the neoliberal mantra would pose it). In so doing, I would like to try to bring about a rapprochment between Foucauldian governmentality studies with political economy and look at models of ideal citizenship in China that are constructed in ways that are produced through stratified avenues for human capital development while also being brutally exclusionary. In this context, ideal citizenship is one that can allow its subjects to “stride” freely across national boundaries but still maintain a sense of Chineseness, but how this “national difference” gets articulated may be quite different from earlier iterations. The ethnographic core of this paper would retain my original proposal to look at the role of maternal labor in neoliberal subject making, but it has now been reframed in response to conversations begun in the first workshop.