Ethnographies of the State

Current sociological and social anthropological thinking now views the state as an object of ethnographic exploration. But can the state, a "macro subject", be explored by methods similar to that employed for the study of small-scale and bounded communities? A workshop in Delhi debated on the nature of the state as an entity that exists in and is also constantly created by society. It looked at aspects of representation and categories, through which the state seeks to define society and in turn, the latter's response to such bounded characterisation.