Discussion: Anthropology and citizenship

Discussion: Anthropology and citizenship ALEXAND RA OU ROU SSOFF AND CHRISTINA TOREN The meaning of citizenship in any given historical period and in any nation-state resides in the way that people conceive of the relationship between themselves and the state. The nature of this relationship has historically been inextricably tied to questions of democracy and where sovereignty lies. Within the modern period, at least since the Levellers in England in the 1640s and 1650s, rival conceptions of the equality of citizens and the sovereignty of the people have been the site of moral and political conflict and, in some famous instances, revolution. Throughout the French revolution, ideas of citizenship were continually being revised and fought over. Even within the relatively narrow confines of France’s Second Republic (1848–51), rival conceptions of citizenship implying quite distinct notions of civil equality and political liberty fed deep political struggles. ‘The democrats’ desire was to incorporate social equality into republican citizenship, while the socialists believed it to be inseparable from revolution in relation to capital and labour’ (Furet 1995:425). Smashing the ancien régime was only the beginning of a long and bloody struggle for equality before the law. The question opened by Nic Craith’s paper seems to have emerged from an explicitly legal framework that is criticised by the author because it ignores the ‘cultural dimension’. She does not tell us about the history of this framework but apparently takes it for granted that it is to be the basis for any analysis of citizenship and culture. This starting point gives rise to a series of abstract, predictable oppositions between, for example, ‘culture as an on-going process or praxis’ and citizenship as a bundle of rights and privileges ‘conferred on individuals who recognize the legitimacy of the political state’. Through this opposition, the French revolution is interpreted as blind to culture (which, often enough, Nic Craith treats as identical with ethnicity), that is, as ‘an event which asserted the primacy of citizenship over culture, of universalism over specificity’ [our italics]. But to take this view is to impose on the complexity of the past a framework that cannot even begin to embrace the diverse and conflicting interests and interpretations of what it was to be a citizen in revolutionary France – as is apparent from the single sentence above that we have taken from Furet. From its beginning, democracy’s manifold tensions and contradictions were manifested and played out in people’s lives. This is still the case and because it is, we cannot assume a priori any consensus on what citizenship and democracy might be. Nic Craith asserts that there is a distinction commonly made between civic and ethnic nationalism and that this is ‘a false dichotomy. Each variant of nationalism places great emphasis on the majority culture but they do it differently’. Here we find manifest all the problems of this paper. From a certain perspective it may seem that in contemporary Social Anthropology (2005), 13, 2, 207–209. © 2005 European Association of Social Anthropologists doi:10.1017/S0964028205001254 Printed in the United Kingdom 207 Europe (as in some other parts of the world) ideas about citizenship have come to be inextricably bound up with ideas about culture and about nationalism – but have they? Or is this mere assertion by various commentators? Surely citizenship is inseparable from the idea of democracy and the issue of how people preserve their sovereignty, but if we look beyond Europe and take the case of Iraq, for example, it is abundantly clear that to find out what is going on there requires an initial awareness that the relationships between religious, moral and political ideas cannot be assumed a priori. It appears that we are seeing a bloody struggle between rival religious groups, but what exactly is the role of the United States or of other interested parties in promoting one or other of these groups? Is culture even relevant here? Or to put it another way: do any of the central protagonists in this terrible struggle explain what they are doing in terms of something called ‘culture’? And if they do, what do they mean? Even in Europe, where we know that the idea of culture is pervasive, its meaning remains up for grabs because here too both culture and citizenship were, and continue to be, material issues. Citizenship thus demands ethnographic investigation. What is salient to people in respect of their rights in a given civil society? How do people make use of the idea of citizenship, if at all? What does it mean to them? What practices and/or obligations do they think it entails? Do some people take citizenship for granted, and, if so, who are they and how do they conceive of their relation to the state? Are they a self-identified elite? And who gets to say what named groups are to be distinguished as such and who is, or is not, a member of any given one of them? These questions all bear on the issue of sovereignty. To assume that it is the state that decides both the named groups that exist and which of our claims to group membership are formally to be allowed, is already to take for granted a loss of sovereignty. Neither is culture to be taken for granted. Whether the category has any explanatory value is fundamentally a matter of how people make use of it – and this, too, is a matter for ethnographic investigation. This is especially the case nowadays when it seems that culture is on everyone’s lips and often enough replaces ethnicity as an identifying (and essentialising) tool for deciding who’s who. The status of culture as an analytical category has been in question, however, at least since cultural anthropology claimed it for its own. Thus Radcliffe Brown, as a result of his experience in South Africa in the 1920s, came to the view that ‘[t]o base politics on cultural difference was a recipe for disaster’ (Kuper 1999:xiv). Indeed, despite (or perhaps because of) the many existing definitions of culture, one may still argue as did Radcliffe-Brown that ‘that word denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction’ (ibid.) Thus Kuper points out, rightly, that ‘[c]omplex notions like culture . . . inhibit analysis of the relationships among the variables they pack together. Religious beliefs, rituals, knowledge, moral values, the arts, rhetorical genres and so on should be separated out from each other rather than bound together in a single bundle labelled culture . . .’ (Kuper 1999:245). That culture is so readily and so often equated with ethnicity makes it equally important that we come to grips with Walter Benn Michael’s argument that ‘[t]he modern concept of culture is not . . . a critique of racism, it is a form of racism’ (Kuper 1999:241). For all these reasons we think that it makes sense to give up the idea of culture as an analytical category. Better to begin with the recognition that, considered as a spatiotemporal location, the lived present contains within it both its own past and its potential future; it is our artefact, an emergent aspect of the way that, as living systems that are human, we function at once to constitute and incorporate our own history. 208 ALEXANDRA OUROUSSOFF AND CHRISTINA TOREN For us as anthropologists, the issue is not what model of citizenship we should endorse but rather what ethnography can do to analyse how these key categories – citizenship and culture – are being constituted anew (and in this process transformed) in the practices of their everyday lives by particular people(s) in particular times and places. The challenge of contemporary ethnography is to render analytical the categories people use to talk about themselves, their lives and their ideas of the world. So when we are asked to consider the questions anthropologists might ask of culture and citizenship, we can take nothing for granted. The first and most fundamental question is the following: do people actually make use of these categories as such and, if so, how? Alexandra Ouroussoff and Christina Toren School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University a.ouroussoff@brunel.ac.uk/christina.toren@brunel.ac.uk References Furet, François. 1995. Revolutionary France, 1770–1880. Oxford: Blackwell. Kuper, Adam. 1999. Culture. The anthropologists’ account. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. DISCUSSION: ANTHROPOLOGY AND CITIZENSHIP 209