Citation

Halstead N. Soc. Anthropol. 2008; 16(1): 19-33.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00033.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this article, I examine a range of petty transactions in Guyana which also render the state visible in everyday practices. Various police and other officials intervene in domestic incidents and minor affrays where they are ‘topped up’ by ‘ordinary people’, as payments for them to be less powerful. They rely on a local ideal model of the state which constructs it in opposition to people. Both the particular officials and people use or contest this model in power negotiations. The transactions occur through or alongside violence, variously experienced. Certain officials compete for the role of victims with the people who suffer at their hands, while their victims can make efforts to empower themselves. The resulting mode of victimhood is also about agency. In the alternating roles of victim and agent, people and officials also engage in complicit partnerships. The partnerships relate to another local ideal model about corruption as necessary to make things work. The power negotiations and violence, however, both question this model and that of the state as one of containment and as isolated from society. While sudden brutal violence occurs, it is the trivial violence as part of the everyday which constantly demonstrates victims, agents and the state in a landscape of power relations. The transactions also illustrate an ideal model of the state as extraordinary. In turn, trivial violence routinises these understandings.