Introduction

Critique of Anthropology
33(1) 37
Citizenship, the self, ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X12466684
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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 respon-
sibilities (Marshall, 1983). We contend that citizenship is an important and helpful way of
framing anthropological enquiry into politics. The authors ask how citizenship is experi-
enced 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 import-
ant 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 aect politics: namely, to participate in the decisions that aect
their lives (Castoriadis, 1992; Heater, 1999; Oldeld, 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: sl360@cam.ac.uk
4 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

depends upon two elements: structural conditions for the realization of full citizen-
ship 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 top-
down, 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; Srensen, 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 ethno-
graphic 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 anthro-
pologists, 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 specic (Liberal) political contexts. Indeed,
political claims and talk of membership can also be articulated through dierent
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 citizenship-
making beyond a simple top-down or bottom-up dichotomy, anchoring the dis-
cussion in detailed ethnography. All of the authors take dierent approaches to
citizenship as a category, but all of them point to an expansive notion of citizen-
ship, 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 pol-
itical agency generally even where not specically 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 dierent theoretical perspectives on the utility of an analytical language of
citizenship. All the authors pay extensive attention to the variety of ways in which
Lazar and Nuijten 5

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 eects of the state citizenship game. Grisa 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 ana-
lysis of negotiations between people and the state over land in South Africa, out-
lining how people shift between competing regimes of citizenship consisting of
older state-directed versions and newer market-inuenced 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 dierent kinds (Grisa, Lazar and Stack) to Maoist
revolutionaries (Shah). This is contrasted to situations where collective or individ-
ual political action meets more top-down projects of assigning particular kinds of
citizenship based upon specic categories of personhood. Thus, for example, citi-
zenship 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 peoples 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 con-
tributors discuss how political agency is channelled, restricted, contained, or even
obliterated, sometimes through explicit discourses of citizenship informed by lib-
eral understandings of the term (Shah, Nuijten) but also through other forms of
organising collective action (Grisa, 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
6 Critique of Anthropology 33(1)

grant (nr. 452-05-365) of NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientic 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 eorts; and to Anna
Malinowska and Helga Brandt for administrative assistance.

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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.