The Anthropology Of Citizenship: A Reader

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

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).