The project 'Experimental States' was born of a methodological question: how to deploy ethnography, known for its attention to detail, to the everyday, the subjective, the relational, the intimate and unexpected, in the task of understanding the modern state?  

The project is a collaborative ethnographic study of expert knowledge and regional government in Cusco, Peru. Our goal is to investigate (1) how regional government experiments with, and constructs moral legitimacy in relation to new forms of regulatory authority and technical expertise, and (2) how the normative imaginaries of nature, resources, territory and law that inform cultural understandings of the nation state are articulated with respect to a newly formed, regional government.  We study these processes by tracing public controversies over the deployment and interpretation of expert knowledge in the areas of law and civil engineering.  A corollary goal of the project is to advance collaborative and comparative methodologies in the ethnographic study of the modern state.