Lake/Flato

In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.