Beyond the state? Civil sociality and other notions of citizenship

Abstract

Social scientists generally begin with a definition of citizenship, usually the rights-bearing membership of nation-states, and have given less attention to the notions of citizenship held by the people whom they study. Not only is how people see themselves as citizens crucial to how they relate to states as well as to each other, but informants' own notions of citizenship can be the source of fresh theoretical insights about citizenship. In this article I set out the four notions of citizenship that I encountered during interviews and participant observation across two contrasting regions of Mexico in 2007–2010. The first three notions of citizenship were akin to the political, social and civil rights of which social scientists have written. I will show that they took particular forms in the Mexican context, but they did still entail a relationship with nation-states – that of claiming rights as citizens on states. But the most common notion of citizenship, which has been little treated by social scientists, was of civil sociality – to be a citizen was to live in society, ideally in a civil way. I argue that civil sociality constitutes a kind of citizenship beyond the state, one that is not reducible to the terms in which people relate to states.