Introduction
Citizenship, the self, and political agency
Critique of Anthropology 33(1) 3–7 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X12466684 coa.sagepub.com
Sian Lazar University of Cambridge, UK
Monique Nuijten University of Wageningen, The Netherlands
Abstract The articles in this special issue start from the premise that citizenship is more than the legal status of member of a national political community with certain rights and responsibilities (Marshall, 1983). We contend that citizenship is an important and helpful way of framing anthropological enquiry into politics. The authors ask how citizenship is experienced in any given context, and thereby explore how particular political communities and political agency are constituted. Keywords Citizenship, rights, political anthropology, state, social movements
Introduction The articles in this special issue start from the premise that citizenship is more than the legal status of member of a national political community with certain rights and responsibilities (Marshall, 1983). This proposition is by now well established among both anthropologists and political theorists of citizenship. Accepting it means that, for the purposes of analysis, the processes and practices that make someone into a full member of a given political community are at least as important as the end result itself (status). As such, we contend that citizenship becomes a very helpful way of framing anthropological enquiry into politics. We can ask how citizenship is experienced in any given context, and thereby explore how particular political communities and political agency are constituted. For many political theorists those practices of political membership turn upon the ability of citizens to affect politics: namely, to participate in the decisions that affect their lives (Castoriadis, 1992; Heater, 1999; Oldfield, 1990). This ability in turn Corresponding author: Sian Lazar, Division of Social Anthropology, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK. Email:
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depends upon two elements: structural conditions for the realization of ‘full’ citizenship and the self-creation of citizens as full, or good, or active, citizens. Indeed, theories and practices of citizenship (especially in civic republication formulations) have always implied an ethical project of working on the self to create good citizens, from the ancient Greeks to Rousseau (Rousseau, 1762), and contemporary civics and citizenship classes in schools constitute similar projects. Such projects are often topdown, as states make citizens through schooling or welfare regimes. This is where much of the anthropology of citizenship has focussed its energy to date (Baitenmann, 2005; Cody, 2009; Cruikshank, 1999; Feldman, 2007; Lazar, 2010; Lukose, 2005; Luykx, 1999; Ong, 1999, 2003, 2006; Petryna, 2002; Sørensen, 2008). In addition, as Aihwa Ong pointed out in an important article published in 1996, top-down processes of ‘being made’ articulate with more bottom-up processes of ‘self-making’ (Ong, 1996: 737), or technologies of the self. This has required ethnographic attention to the agency of citizens, as well as those claiming citizenship, or claiming better citizenship themselves. A body of work has focussed on how people frame and make claims of the state (Holston, 2008; Petryna, 2002). These processes of claims-making may be articulated through a local language of citizenship, as in Latin America, especially Brazil (Albro, 2005; Castle, 2008; Dagnino, 2003; Holston, 2008; Roth-Gordon, 2009; Wittman, 2009), or South Africa, where HIV/AIDS activists have successfully mobilized using the language of citizenship to demand treatment from the state (Nguyen, 2005). Elsewhere, other idioms may be mobilised to name similar processes, such as ‘vecino’, or ‘neighbour’ in El Alto, Bolivia (Lazar, 2008). In such a vision, citizenship (as an analytical category) names forms of articulating claims. For many theorists of citizenship, including anthropologists, those claims are to rights (Isin, 2009; see also Mandel, 2008). However, although the link between citizenship and rights is often assumed, citizenship is linked to languages of rights in quite specific (Liberal) political contexts. Indeed, political claims and talk of membership can also be articulated through different languages, such as obligations (Englund, 2006), or the naturalised membership of a collectivity (Lazar, 2008). The articles in this special issue depict competing processes of citizenshipmaking beyond a simple top-down or bottom-up dichotomy, anchoring the discussion in detailed ethnography. All of the authors take different approaches to citizenship as a category, but all of them point to an expansive notion of citizenship, as about political belonging beyond just legal status and rights. One of the tensions running through these articles is whether anthropologists can broaden the concept of citizenship so far as to include political agency or belonging in a very wide sense. Thus, citizenship might be either an analytical category denoting political agency generally even where not specifically and explicitly articulated around questions of citizenship, or a language of the political that may or may not be used by local actors. This tension is intentionally left unresolved in this special issue, with the authors taking different theoretical perspectives on the utility of an analytical language of citizenship. All the authors pay extensive attention to the variety of ways in which
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citizenship is used in theory as well as in daily life. Some seek to apply the language of citizenship to questions of political agency and self-making in theoretical spaces quite distant from what one might usually expect. Thus, Lazar argues that the theory of citizenship can be applied to membership of a political community apart from the state, namely the trade union itself, while Shah argues that because people in the Jharkhand region of India do not seek better integration into the state a language of citizenship is not appropriate. At least not that liberal language of citizenship used by bourgeois leftist intellectuals, because it does not capture fully the extent to which people in the Jharkhand region are alienated from the state and political action is structured by intimate social relations such as kinship or caste. Stack argues that Mexican citizens speak of citizenship in a language of ‘civil sociality’, as a moral language of the public that goes beyond their relationship to the state itself, while Nuijten contrasts local languages of political belonging with the language of citizenship employed by the Brazilian state. Through the analysis of the wider ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2006) in a slum in Recife, she shows the perverse effects of the state ‘citizenship game’. Grisaffi uses ideas about ‘Presidential citizenship’ to discuss formations of democracy in the coca-growing Chapare region of Bolivia and how they articulated with those of the Bolivian national government once Evo Morales, the coca-growers’ leader, became President. James uses anthropological discussions of citizenship to inform her analysis of negotiations between people and the state over land in South Africa, outlining how people shift between competing regimes of citizenship consisting of older state-directed versions and newer market-influenced ones. More generally, the concept of citizenship has proven a productive means for the articles in this special issue to focus analytically on political action: how individuals relate to the state in some form, with a particular emphasis on collective political action, from trade unions of different kinds (Grisaffi, Lazar and Stack) to Maoist revolutionaries (Shah). This is contrasted to situations where collective or individual political action meets more top-down projects of assigning particular kinds of citizenship based upon specific categories of personhood. Thus, for example, citizenship can be articulated as the ‘correct’ kind of participation in development practice (James and Nuijten). However, crucially, the study of citizenship requires an acknowledgement of ordinary people’s ways of resisting or accommodating such categorisation as they build themselves as particular kinds of citizens. Importantly though, these processes are not necessarily liberatory, and the contributors discuss how political agency is channelled, restricted, contained, or even obliterated, sometimes through explicit discourses of citizenship informed by liberal understandings of the term (Shah, Nuijten) but also through other forms of organising collective action (Grisaffi, Lazar, Stack). Acknowledgements The articles in this special issue were initially presented as papers at the conference ‘Citizenship, the Self and Political Agency’, organised by Sian Lazar and Monique Nuijten, and with the support of CRASSH at the University of Cambridge and VIDI
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grant (nr. 452-05-365) of NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. The editors are grateful to all the participants in this conference – especially for their patience in the face of volcanic ash clouds and subsequent rescheduling efforts; and to Anna Malinowska and Helga Brandt for administrative assistance.
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Nguyen V-K (2005) Antiretroviral globalism, biopolitics, and therapeutic citizenship. In: Ong A and Collier S (eds) Global Assemblages. Technology, Poltics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 124–144. Oldfield A (1990) Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World. London-New York: Routledge. Ong A (1996) Cultural citizenship as subject-making: immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37(5): 737–762. Ong A (1999) Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Ong A (2003) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, The New America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ong A (2006) Neoliberal as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Petryna A (2002) Life Exposed. Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roth-Gordon J (2009) The language that came down the hill: slang, crime, and citizenship in Rio de Janeiro. American Anthropologist 111(1): 57–68. Rousseau J-J (1762) Emile: Project Gutenberg. Sørensen BR (2008) The politics of citizenship and difference in Sri Lankan schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(4): 423–443. Wittman H (2009) Reworking the metabolic rift: La Via Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty. Journal of Peasant Studies 36(4): 805–826.
Author biographies Sian Lazar is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK. She has conducted research on collective politics and citizenship in Bolivia and Argentina, with a current focus on trade unionism among state employees in Argentina. She is the author of El Alto, Rebel City. Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2008), and co-author of Doing the Rights Thing. Rights-based Development and Latin American NGOs (London, ITDG publishing, 2003). Monique Nuijten is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She conducted research on peasant communities and state formation in Mexico and Peru. Her current research focuses on slum upgrading projects and power relations in Northeast Brazil. She published the books Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organization in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 2003), the co-edited volume Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) and numerous articles.
