Ritty Lukose (New York University)
Citizenship and the ‘Political’
This paper will explore the limits and possibilities of citizenship as a framework in anthropology by examining the ways in which it has expanded our understandings of what constitutes the political. Using an analysis of the emergence of new forms of consumer citizenship in postcolonial and globalizing Kerala (South India), the paper will engage recent critiques of citizenship as a framework that relies on bourgeois, liberal understandings -- one that prevents an adequate engagement with the nature of a governmentalized, postcolonial politics. The paper explores the limits and possibilities of such a critique and questions how it might be addressed by the ways in which citizenship is understood in anthropology, while at the same time arguing that such a critique might point to the ways in which the political in the anthropology of citizenship might need some re-thinking.
