THEORIES OF CITIZENSHIP

Theories of Citizenship

Theories of Citizenship

Introduction

Is it possible to study citizenship ethnographically? What is the concept's analytical purchase in framing and helping us understand the complexities and trivialities of the interactions not only between people and the institutions, managers and infrastructures of a nation-state, but also between fragments of populations in “sites of citizens' conflict” (Humphrey 1999:23), for example, in an ethnically polarized yet entangled town like Skopje? The concept of citizenship is probably overburdened with liberal connotations of universal rights and obligations of an individual rational subject of a state, but this narrow view of citizenship, which has a specific historical career, leaves out unexamined many cultural practices and perceptions that inform people's daily dealings with the political realities of their lives. Herein, I would like to review theories of citizenship and ethnographic examples of meanings and practices of everyday citizenship and to suggest that insights from cognitive anthropology can move further the barriers of thinking ethnographically about modes of being political.

Genealogy of the concept

The big divide in theories of citizenship is between the liberal definitions of citizenship in terms of political and economic rights and duties of an individual and communitarian theories that place emphasis on the participatory and relational aspects of citizenship as a matter of community politics (Lister 1997: 29; Mahdi 2006: 6). The liberal approach to citizenship foregrounds formal, political and economic, entitlements and protected liberties which individuals as citizens of a state can legitimately claim to promote their interests (Somers 1994: 64). The idea of citizenship emerged in a specific Anglo-American context, which makes it prone to suspicions and charges of ethnocentrism. Stephen Kalberg (1993: 91-114) suggests that today's liberal citizenship took shape as an expansion of allegiance-based solidarities of families, artisans and merchants into the more encompassing fields of city economies. Later, the economic and political relations within cities were recast according to the universalizing and impersonal standards of civic responsibility, trust, egalitarianism and world-oriented individualism that congealed the above-mentioned bourgeois values into a single dominant model of citizenship as activism (ibid.: 98). The model of citizenship as activism has naturalized (Somers 1994: 65) and valorised the individual commitment to utilitarian rationality in pursuit of common good at least partly inspired by the premises of the Protestant ethics (Kalberg 1993: 100).

In 1987-1991, Sri Lanka was a setting for the nationalist insurgence of the Sinhala youth, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. The reprisals of the state against the JVP were atrocious, with “bodies rotting on beaches, smouldering in grotesque heaps by the riversides, and floating down rivers” (ibid.: 123). Many young men and women were unaccounted for, and the Mother's Front, a grassroot organization, sprang as an association of mothers of the 'disappeared' youth. The Mother's Front explicitly averred that their goals were not political despite receiving their funding from the main opposition party, Sri Lanka Freedom party. The mothers sought out the 'normalization' of the situation, or, more accurately, the end of violence. The Mothers continuously stressed that they had no political ambitions and ...