Editorial: Beyond the backdrop state? Kirk Dombrowski Anthony Marcus Published online: 24 October 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Until the 1970s, state theory in anthropology was largely confined to questions of state formation in either the archaeological or colonial sense, so much so that when Christine Ward Gailey (a contributor to this issue) wrote a review of ‘‘the state of the state’’ in Dialectical Anthropology, her analysis was aimed mainly at demonstrating how global events—the US loss in the Vietnam war and the advent of green revolution development strategies—had influenced archaeological and ethnohistorical accounts of states coming into being (Gailey 1985). In other ways, the state remained absent from contemporary ethnographic accounts, a criticism that had been raised by historical anthropologists like Leacock (1972) or Wolf (1962) over the previous decades. Indeed, much of the effort of the historical school was aimed at showing that traditional ‘‘state-less’’ anthropological subjects were in fact deeply influenced by state-sponsored processes and state actors (Wolf 1982, Roseberry 1989). The myth of the anthropological isolate and its seemingly incommensurable culture was confronted by the realization that conventional ethnographic subjects were in fact part and parcel of global historical processes of state and capitalist expansion. The new project was, as Gailey made clear, one of re-discovering the types of connections that brought conventional ethnographic accounts into dialogue with mainstream narratives of development, labor, domination, and exploitation, as these processes moved steadily back past the ‘ethnographic horizon’. Yet, coming at what in retrospect now appears as the end of the historical anthropology movement, Gailey’s essay also marked an ironic end (until recently) to anthropological concern with states and their functions. Since that time K. Dombrowski (&) CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA e-mail: kdombrowski@jjay.cuny.edu K. Dombrowski Á A. Marcus John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA 123 Dialect Anthropol (2008) 32:1–5 DOI 10.1007/s10624-008-9060-y