Citizenship

Abstract

At its most fundamental, citizenship means political belonging, and to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community. Anthropological work on the theme of citizenship tends to break open the classic version of citizenship as a universal legal status belonging to citizens of a given nation-state. Instead, it recognizes the differentiated nature of political membership, and the ways that citizenship acts as an ordering and disciplining device as well as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities. These may include the state but they are not limited to it. In dialogue with political theorists, anthropologists of citizenship have argued that the constitution of any given community requires a considerable amount of work, and that meaningful membership is more than the possession of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship may be formal or substantive, full or partial, and it is always under construction, as citizens and noncitizens claim inclusion and effective participation in political life. That may be articulated through languages of rights but may also be conducted—and contested—through other kinds of everyday or insurgent political practices. One of the main focuses of ethnographic study of the practices of citizenship has therefore been on how people relate to the state, bringing out the relationship between people and state bureaucracies and between people and law. Another aspect is the scale at which relevant political communities operate, as anthropologists have added to the discussion of national citizenship with studies of cosmopolitan, transnational, or global citizenships and of local, city-based formations. Citizenship is a complex bundle of practices of encounter between the state and citizens at different scales or levels. Because citizenship practices are also the means by which societies organize inclusion and exclusion, the figure of the noncitizen is crucial to the construction of citizenship. Noncitizens might be conceptualized as strangers, migrants, or refugees, and these individuals always raise questions about the definitions of political communities and their borders. Central to all these processes of inclusion, exclusion, encounter, and claims-making is the way that people (citizens and noncitizens) build their own political agency and subjecthood under what constraints and in what realms of life, including the most intimate.