Kosh, Insa Lee. Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics, and Welfare in Austerity Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 274 pages

Insa Lee Kosh’s Personalizing the State is an ethnographically rooted and historically informed account of state-citizen relations as seen from the vantage point of working class citizens. Through the lived experiences of the residents, mostly women of a social housing estate in England, referred to as Park End by the author, Kosh brings to light the gendered and class character of state control in post-war Britain. Central to the book’s thesis, however, is the insight into how citizens at the margins exercise their agency to personalize the state by using the state apparatus as a tool as they navigate through the class-based system of state control. In doing so, Kosh challenges several dominant narratives surrounding the state and democracy in contemporary times. Beginning with the punitive paradox—the illiberal turn that liberal democracy has taken (7), as reflected in the increasingly disciplinary and exclusionary thrust of criminal justice policies and the accompanying popular support for them—Kosh’s entry point is to explain the puzzle of democratic support for anti-democratic measures (8). Adopting an interdisciplinary lens that brings ethnography, political and legal anthropology, criminology, and political economy together, the ethnographic account reveals a complicated picture that goes beyond outright acceptance or rejection of the state authority. The book comprises seven substantive chapters. Chapter One traces the political history of Council Estates. Established in the post-war period to provide housing to the industrial working class, Kosh sees the history of Council Estates as representative of a history of state-building aimed at class segregation and class control. In a nuanced analysis, Kosh dispels the mainstream portrayal of the post-war welfare state in Britain as inclusive and universal by pointing out the exclusions and gendered assumptions that underpinned the paternalistic welfare state, even in its golden age of social democracy. In doing so, Kosh dismisses the contemporary punitive turn in governance as a radical break from the past, and instead emphasizes the continued legacy of gendered and class-based state coercion which has only become more pronounced in neoliberal times. Chapter Two sheds light on the local state as it actually operates on Park End. The ethnography enables Kosh to bring to the fore the divergence in the notions of citizenship espoused by the local state and adhered to by the citizens of Park End. In contrast to liberal democracy’s individualized notion of personhood, the citizens of Park End draw their ideas of a good citizen entitled to state benefits from a conception of personhood that values interdependence and mutual relations of care (64). This, however, unfortunately places them in the category of bad citizens in the perception of the state. To the extent that local moral personhood does not conform to the statist understanding of citizenship, it is seen as an emic state failure (61). The next two chapters elaborate on the experiences of single mothers and social housing tenants as they personalize the state. Questioning the very category of single mothers as rooted in patriarchal assumptions, Kosh’s ethnography reveals how the “state” has replaced the “man” (97) for the single mothers as they engage with the state to claim means-tested state welfare. The individual-centric imagination of the benefits system conflicts with their own life worlds in which notions of care and building and maintaining family homes are valued. While it forces these women to engage with the state in ways that often run counter to the law, it also further exposes them to surveillance and intrusions of the state. In doing so, the chapter highlights how “gender emerges as an instrument of class coercion for working class people” (91). Chapter Four brings into focus how …