The Anthropology of Citizenship: A Reader - Paperback

by Sian Lazar (Editor)

The Anthropology of Citizenship introduces the theoretical foundations of and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world, in local, national and global contexts. Key readings provide a cross-cultural perspective on citizenship practices, and an individual citizen's relationship with the state.

• Introduces a range of exciting and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world
• Provides key readings for students and researchers who wish to gain an understanding of citizenship practices, and an individual's relationship with the state in a global context
• Offers an anthropological perspective on citizenship, the self and political agency, with a focus on encounters between citizens and the state in education, law, development, and immigration policy
• Provides students with an understanding of the theoretical foundations of citizenship, as characterized by liberal and civic republican ideas of political belonging and exclusion
• Explores how citizenship is constructed at different scales and in different spaces
• Twenty-five key writings identify what is a new and vibrant subfield within politics and anthropological research

Back Jacket

Concepts of individual and global citizenship have flourished in recent years and Sian Lazar's timely reader introduces cutting-edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world. This collection brings together twenty-five critical essays that offer crucial insights for students and researchers into the historical developments of citizenship, and contemporary relationships between people, the state, and the law from a cross-cultural perspective. The Anthropology of Citizenship discusses some of the most important pieces in the political philosophy and anthropological theory of the theme, exploring the historical development of understandings of citizenship and its variability across the world.

Lazar offers readings in Part I that highlight contemporary thinking on citizenship through key political and anthropological theorists. Part II reveals the rich ethnographic record available on political processes and citizenship, illuminating the relationship between citizens and the state, and between citizens, the state and non-citizens. The contributors demonstrate the potential for the anthropology of citizenship to make exciting contributions to anthropology, political economy, sociology and social theory.

Author Biography

Sian Lazar has been a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge since 2005. She is the author of El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (2008), and is co-author, with Maxine Molyneux, of Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-Based Development and Latin American NGOs (2003).