Critique of Anthropology

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.

This article analyses the effects of slum upgrading on the lives of slum dwellers, especially on their position in society and their relation with the state. It zooms in on the implementation of Prometrópole, a World Bank-funded slum upgrading project in Recife that removes the population from shacks close to rivers to new housing estates. In this project, the state embraces participatory democracy and stresses the growing inclusion of the poor as citizens of the Brazilian nation-state. The question that inspired the article is: ‘How does the “citizenship agenda” employed by the Brazilian state relate to practices of political belonging in the urban periphery, characterized by social exclusion and violence?’ On the basis of ethnographic research, the article concludes that the upgrading of poor neighbourhoods indeed increases feelings of belonging and inclusion among the poor population. At the same time, however, the stress on the responsible citizen and the empty participatory procedures in the project have the perverse effects of side-lining the poor and reinforcing clientelist politics.

The anthropological study of citizenship enables an understanding of restitutive and redistributive reforms in the post-transitional context of South Africa. In its earlier, state-derived form, citizenship’s situated and contingent character, its use of pre-existing modes of identification as templates, and its ethnic differentiation which expresses ‘class’ distinctions while also masking them, reveal that no single democratic vision can easily encompass all of those who would belong in a new society. In its later market-oriented form, citizenship becomes more individuated, with discourses stressing enterprise, responsibility and the need to earn rights. The term ‘neoliberal governmentality’ has been used to describe the switch from state- to market-driven arrangements, but is inadequate to do so since it overlooks the extent to which state and market intermesh and are tightly interwoven, with apparently purely market-oriented initiatives reliant on extensive state intervention both for design and implementation. In societies undergoing rapid transition, even though new policies and social forces have come into play and people have responded to these in new ways, this novelty is mitigated and mediated through older social forms, attitudes and approaches, which have left their imprint upon both formal institutions and on the expectations and responses of those who ‘receive’ those institutions’ interventions. The paper calls for a view of citizenship which merges elements – state and market – that might at first sight seem contradictory: and which both acknowledges the power of wider frameworks and recognises the ability of ordinary actors on the ground to respond to and sometimes resist these.

“All of us are presidents” examines the promise and disappointments of direct democracy that followed Evo Morales’ election as president of Bolivia. Working with the literature on politics, the state, and social movements in Latin America, the author contrasts ideas of normative democracy with radical democracy. The article pursues two ideas. First, in the wake of Morales’ election his core political base in the Chapare region perceived and engaged in politics as if they exercised direct, structural authority over the president’s policies. Second, while Morales initially embraced direct democracy he quickly distanced himself from this practice. As the coca growers observe, Morales abandon their political practices they have ceased to refer to themselves as presidents. Therefore, the author suggest that the model of direct democracy that Morales and his aides have promoted is in fact nothing more than a stark utopian claim designed to ensure the legitimacy of the MAS party.

Citizenship has been in the last thirty years a significant concern of anthropologists, not least because it has been in the same period a concern of people around the world. At least, the term “citizenship” has been used widely, if not always in quite the same way as anthropologists have used it, especially those anthropologists who have paid less attention to their informants’ understandings of it. During fieldwork in west Mexico in 2007–2010, I found that my informants did not reduce being a citizen to having a relationship with the state or government. Many of them said that being a citizen was ultimately about “living in society”. Their use of the term “citizen” reminds us that many different things have been called “citizenship” over the centuries, and that some things now called “citizenship”, such as claiming rights on states, have not always been referred to as such. However, I prefer to focus on the concepts that my informants sometimes labeled “citizenship” rather than on their choice of the word itself, and to be more precise I use the term civil sociality to gloss their sense of living in society, ideally in a civil way. I focus on how civil sociality stands in relation to law as well as to rights-bearing, especially in two sets of events in which people pitched their claims in terms of both civil sociality and law. Throughout, I draw out the methodological, historical, ethnographic, theoretical, and normative implications of the way in which my informants juxtapose civil sociality and law or rights-bearing. I end the article by comparing my informants’ notions with those of anthropologists, noting not just the differences but a striking similarity. Anthropologists, like my informants, treat “society” as a ground that lies beyond institutions such as law.

In recent years, liberal concepts of citizenship have been appropriated in the Indian subcontinent by various sections of the urban bourgeoisie, in particular, left-leaning intellectuals and activists, to make claims off the state on behalf of their poorer rural (sometimes urban) counterparts. In the context of the struggle between the Indian Government and the Maoist revolution, citizenship has provided a convenient means for civil liberties groups to articulate a notion of ‘the people’ as set apart from both the actions and practices of the Indian Government as well as the Maoist revolutionaries, while at the same time promoting the reach of the Indian state. Life in Maoist areas, however, reveals the blurred boundaries between the villagers and the Maoists, the historic alienation of the state from people’s lives, and as such the limits of liberal notions of citizenship, as evoked by the citizen’s rights activists, to analyse the potential of people’s relation with the polity. The paper suggests that this liberal concept of citizenship paradoxically both enables but also perhaps potentially limits the space for a more radical politics. As proponents of an extreme left politics, the paper also critically focuses on Maoist tactics in showing up the state and its responsibilities to its citizens, reflecting on the implications of these tactics for their Marxian utopia and the future relationship between the individual and the state in a communist society.

The paper presents findings from research on political subjectivity and citizenship with two public‐sector trade unions in Buenos Aires. I outline some of the relations between trade unionism and citizenship in Argentina and then explore the concept of ‘contención’ (‘containment’), a group‐based technology of the self which is fundamental to the construction of political agency and citizenship within the most active members of these trade unions.