Personal States

by Catherine Alexander

"Catherine Alexander charts how Turkish people, both within and outside the state bureaucracy, attempt to personalize the impersonality of the state. Based on a detailed study of the nationalized Turkish Sugar Corporation, she considers how people from the highest levels of the state bureaucracy to farming villages understand 'the state', and how, in turn, they imagine themselves to be perceived. The narratives and metaphors used in these constructions draw on resources close to hand such as the material organization of state factory compounds, state personnel encountered in the course of everyday life, and images of the family structure. By also exploring notions of state and personhood within the highest echelons of the administration itself, Alexander shows how ideas of 'the state' recede once one is actually 'within'. For officials the state becomes other institutions and Ministries with which they have little contact. The continual process of striving to make connections with othe