Tag Archives: citizenship

Proxy citizenship is the mechanism through which certain rights of citizenship—the ability to make claims for redress to a state—are conferred on activists through relationships with NGOs. Focusing on advocacy from within the policy process, U.S. and Colombian NGOs channeled political legitimacy and rights of access to Colombians, whose claims emerge from the experience of governance as articulated through testimony. This process, and its roots within the shared history of the Putumayo region of Colombia and Washington, DC, reveals emerging practices of citizenship claims and transnational political participation.

Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—or what, arguably, can be seen as torture—might seem strange. But for single Mizrahi welfare mothers in Israel, somatization of bureaucratic logic as physical pain precludes the agency of identity politics. This essay elaborates on Don Handelman’s scholarship on bureaucratic logic as divine cosmology and posits that Israel’s bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that amalgamates gender and race. The essay employs a world anthropologies’ theoretical toolkit to represent bureaucratic torture in multiple narrative modes, including anger, irony, and humor, as a counterexample to dominant U.S.–U.K. formulae for writing and theorizing culture.

In this article, I examine changing meanings of participation for grassroots community leaders in Porto Alegre, Brazil, since the 2004 defeat of the Workers Party (PT) municipal government and a subsequent rise in the presence of both the private sector and NGOs in community politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of community politics in one municipal district, based on interviews I carried out in 2008, I argue that the changing relationship between state, private sector, and civil society has contributed to destabilization of the narrative of active citizenship hegemonic in earlier years, implanting a market-oriented, individualistic ethos in its place.

In this article, I draw from fieldwork on the micropractices of hawkers’ illicit dealings with low-level state functionaries in Mumbai, India, to explore how claims to city space are negotiated. I argue that what is often understood as a breakdown in urban governance is, instead, what I call an “ordinary space of negotiation” that constitutes the grounds on which claims to substantive citizenship are made. This ethnographic exploration of what practices of corruption produce has the possibility to expand how scholars think about the state and political claim making in liberal democratic contexts at large.