Shifting States offers an ethnographic examination of state agency and the relationships between surveillance, bureaucracy, infrastructure and personhood, with an impressive selection of empirically rich and theoretically engaging contributions that are relevant across a range of contemporary issues.

Introduction Part I: Ethnographies of Infrastructure: Assemblage, Experimentation, and Mobilization 1. Contingent statecraft: infrastructures, political creativity, and experimentation 2. Materialising the state: the meaning of water infrastructure 3. Driving into the nation-state: driving, roads, and selfhood in a post-socialist milieu 4. State of the grain: grain of the state: the political- and moral-economy of rice in Indonesia Part II: Dialectics of Security, Surveillance, and Struggle 5. Indigenous social policy, settler colonial dependencies, and toxic lingerings: living through mining and militarism in the Anthropocene 6. Awkward biculturalism: embodying ambiguity in New Zealand Army haka 7. Fear of a free lunch: markets, publics, and the would-be gift Part III: Sensory States, and their Contingent Citizenries 8. Intimate tonguing: the governance of the tongue in smokefree Australia 9. Sensing late-liberal state failure: ecologies of resistance in a post-industrial German city 10. Dialysis in the desert: blood, biomedial technologies, and transformation in Central Australia 11. 'Looking for a nice face': shifting states of marriage and intimate citizenship in Papua New Guinea 12. The state of silence as sensory and social: towards an anthropological appreciation