Paper short abstract

This paper examines the genealogy of Anthropology of citizenship, from a historical and philosophical perspective. It proposes to understand, beyond previous historical accounts, what Anthropology of citizenship, if taken as a legitimate approach, does to our understanding Citizenship (Studies).

Paper long abstract

This paper questions the politics underlying the forms of description, along with their underlying conceptualization process, invented and developed within past anthropologies of citizenship, which provided access to the “ordinariness” of citizenship (Neveu 2015); the uncanny actions, imaginaries, experiences and processes that make a specific situation one of citizenship. Since such a descriptive activity often requires that it be carried out beyond analytic frameworks commonly used to investigate citizenship, anthropologists are faced with the need to resort to other categories, political imaginaries or narrative dispositives as descriptive tools.

I consider such normative shifts/bifurcations as events worth telling, as they invite us to revisit the way we define citizenship by blurring our usual distinctions and connections.

These itineraries are, mainly, motivated by a shared political concern: challenging the ‘political ontologies of violence’ (Graeber 2007) that confine the political field of citizenship (im)possibilities, in imagination(s) and in practice(s), while also foreclosing the possibility of capturing other political futures being citizenshiply crafted under precarious conditions, in present times. As such, anthropology of citizenship has always critically engaged with ‘normative specters’ (statism, coloniality, imperialism, legalism, patriarchy, racism, consequentialism, etc.) haunting our imaginaries of citizenship and, when left uncritically approached or unreflexively used as heuristic devices, still continue to resist the possibility of describing alternative forms of citizenship.

Along the way, it is a unique philosophy of citizenship actions that anthropologists, each in their own way, have been tacitly developing. How can such a philosophy help us see Citizenship Studies and their own history differently?