This provocative volume on the state departs markedly from a conventional analysis that universalizes and standardizes what the state is, does, and means. The writers mean to engage state and stateness as it is encountered in everyday life, ranging from urban and small town life to hospital treatment to cinema attendance and art exhibitions. These essays locate the state in time, space, and circumstances so that it becomes contingent and evocative rather than definitive and authoritative. The volume discusses what we may think or say about the state, what images are evoked, and the formative discourses dealing with the state and its various manifestations through social and cultural reforms. This non-essentialist enterprise offers twelve essays that examine the US, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, South Asia and the Far East with contributors including James Scott, Arundhati Roy, Bruce Cumings, Paul Brass, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Phil Oldenberg.