a most thriving field today. Geertz's comparative work on the Balinese state is an early, famous example. There is today a rich canon of anthropological studies of the state (see for example Abeles 1990). Hastings Donnan, Thomas Wilson and others started in the early 1990s a productive subfield, an “anthropology of borders”, which addresses the ways in which state borders affect local populations, and how people from border areas shape and direct state discourse and state formation (see for example Alvarez, 1996; Thomassen, 1996; Vereni, 1996; Donnan and Wilson, 1994; 1999; 2003). From the 1980s a heavy focus on ethnicity and nationalism developed. ‘Identity’ and ‘identity politics’ soon became defining themes of the discipline, partially replacing earlier focus on kinship and social organization. This made anthropology even more obviously political. Nationalism is to some extent simply state-produced culture, and to be studied as such. And ethnicity is to some extent simply the political organization of cultural difference (Barth 1969). Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism discusses why nationalism came into being. He sees the invention of the printing press as the main spark, enabling shared national emotions, characteristics, events and history to be imagined through common readership of newspapers. The interest in cultural/political identity construction also went beyond the nation-state dimension. By now, several ethnographies have been carried out in the international organizations (like the EU) studying the fonctionnaires as a cultural group with special codes of conduct, dressing, interaction etc. (Abélès, 1992; Wright, 1994; Bellier, 1995; Zabusky, 1995; MacDonald, 1996; Rhodes, ‘t Hart, and Noordegraaf, 2007). Increasingly, anthropological fieldwork is today carried out inside bureaucratic structures or in companies. And bureaucracy can in fact only be studied by living in it – it is far from the rational system we and the practitioners like to think, as Weber himself had indeed pointed out long ago (Herzfeld 1992). The concern with political institutions has also fostered a focus on institutionally driven political agency. There is now an anthropology of policy making (Shore and Wright 1997). This focus has been most evident in Development anthropology or the anthropology of development, which over the last decades has established as one of the discipline’s largest subfields. Political actors like states, governmental institutions, NGOs, International Organizations or business corporations are here the primary subjects of analysis. In their ethnographic work anthropologists have cast a critical eye on