Citizenship as a Communicative Effect

Abstract

Using ethnographic field notes on the media circulation and uptake of two specific government orders in Hyderabad, India, I propose a semiotic approach to looking at how emblems of citizenship are not simply products of state ideologies, but rather products of a dialogic relationship (sometimes contentious, often ordinary) between “state” and “citizens,” and always with reference to a history of communicative events between the two. I argue that citizenship should be understood as a communicative effect that is mediated not solely by sovereign power and strident collective movements, but more often through everyday processes by which emblems of citizenship are entextualized and the discursive interactions through which substantive claims are mobilized, negotiated, and contested. Such an approach can add both epistemological and methodological specificity to political anthropology and push it beyond the limitations of an anthropology of the state.