| dc.description.abstract | In this thesis I explore how the Nigerian state is encountered in various places and how it is experienced as an active force in the making and remaking of peoples' habitable worlds. I am concerned with how people come to know the state through everyday encounters with state agents, practices, and narratives about the state, and how the idea of the state itself is socially constructed. I draw on phenomenological perspectives to explore the state as a phenomenon, coming to existence in the lifeworlds of people in Katsina. I draw on the works of Michel Foucault (1982; 1986), and anthropologists Michael Jackson (2013) and Eric Mueggler (2001), to explore how disciplinary power of the state works through the everyday actions of individuals, constituted in and through them, and their actions in place and time and history. I use the notion of the state as a constitutive force (Mueggler 2001) as a trope throughout my thesis to explore the ways in which people in Katsina understand and experience the Nigerian state, and how, specifically, they balance the tension between attachment and detachment to the state apparatus and the Big Men in the state apparatus. I argue that social changes are primarily felt in localized worlds; in bodies, houses and hometowns. I am concerned with how the formation of knowledge through intersubjective relations shape the ideas one has of the state, of society and of self. My thesis is thus an exploration of how the Nigerian state is increasingly encountered in spheres of social, familial and corporeal production and reproduction, and it is precisely the management of distance to and intimacy of power in relation to one's Being-in-the-world that becomes the primary mechanism through which people experience the Nigerian state as a constitutive force. As I explore how people come to known both the state and their Selves in the "time of politics", I argue that this knowledge is both a product of power relations, as well as the foundations of individual agency. | eng |