Short Abstract

This panel invites anthropological engagement that foregrounds how citizenship situations are enacted through practices of (de)polarization and how anthropology becomes politically implicated in its commitment to translating these practices into political alternatives/possibilities for survival.

Long Abstract

Anthropological investigations of citizenship offer a wide range of descriptions of various practices of (de)polarization, making manifest the connection between citizenship and a strange multiplicity of political imaginaries that cannot be reduced to statism or, more generally, to a “political ontology of violence” (Graeber 2007). As such, anthropology of citizenship invites us not to think of politics beyond (de)polarization but, rather, to look—through descriptive and comparative perspectives—at the variety of its practices, along with their specific political imaginaries, and to understand how they constitute the very “ordinariness” of citizenship (Neveu 2015).

Since its emergence in the 1990s, anthropology of citizenship has shown how the future becomes a political and imaginative field of struggle woven into a diversity of (de)polarization practices along which, at least in prefigurative forms, other political possibilities are kept alive for survival purposes. It has connected citizenship to the art of crafting alternative ways of practicing (de)polarization through social inventiveness, aiming to maintain the possibility of survival amid (spectacular/latent/imagined) crises, along with their polarization dynamics and the ways they affect multiple domains of life (including non-humans and institutions) (e.g., Das 2011; Petryna and Follis 2015).

By paying ethnographic attention to such practices, anthropology of citizenship allows us to grasp the effective and situated conditions of survival, inviting us to investigate and interrogate what form of life is trying to survive through political means and in relation to which (ongoing/possible) crises.

This panel aims to reopen the discussion, from a political anthropology perspective, on the relationship between anthropology and its quest for other political possibilities through a reflexive inquiry into its capacity to make visible (de)polarizing practices that can be described as the very fabric through which citizenship situations are created as political means of survival. The contributions can be based on ongoing or past research.

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