A historical and anthropological approach to governance takes account of particular histories, foregrounds indigenous cultures and grassroots groups, and focuses as much on actual people, their practices and relationships as on formal institutions. Such an approach questions the conventional wisdom that naturalises abstractions like ‘state’ and ‘society’ as if they are real, rather than concepts with particular histories: ‘the state’, for example, is not a human universal but implies the territorial nation-state that emerged in Western Europe and the United States from the end of the eighteenth century. That may not be the most appropriate model for former colonies on the margins of the global system (Douglas 2000)