300650 Citizenship and the state: Anthropological Perspectives (S) (SoSe 2023)

In the context of authoritarianism, migration, war, and inequality, many people do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship promised by the idea of the modern republic. At the same time, the rise of online hatred, conspiracy theories, and the political forces of populist bigotry suggest that civility and the spirit of social cooperation, which were once regarded as cornerstones of citizenship in democratic states, are on the retreat. What are the relations between state apparatuses and the realities of living in a political community? What do citizens contribute to the contours of their states? What are the silent assumptions of thinking citizenship and the state in the way proposed by Western political theory, and how applicable are they to a plural world?

In this seminar, we look at these and other questions from a social anthropological perspective. This means that we will pay special attention to the practices out of which relations between citizenship and the state emerge. Such practices are found in politics, bureaucracies, and more generally in all those areas of social life where states are visible and "the right to have rights" (Hannah Arendt) is negotiated. In keeping with the social anthropological approach, we will focus on ethnographic examples from around the world.