American Ethnologist最新文献

This commentary engages the articles in the “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum by discussing three points: citizen participation in and challenges to bureaucratic practices; the spatialities of citizenship and belonging; and the potentials for co-optation of civic mobilization vis-à-vis the privatization of state responsibilities. It concludes that citizen mobilizations can effectively structure the terms of the debate and create new forms of belonging in the wake of inherited injustices.

This short commentary argues for the utility of a suitably expansive idea of citizenship, one that opens complex terrains for analysis: where citizens work with, against, and alongside the state, and where state power is enabled and sidestepped through multiple embodied processes. I consider the nature of the citizen-state encounter in each article in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum to explore local experiences of sovereignty and state power.

This commentary asks what would change about the analyses in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum if the state were not assumed as the background. Using research on unrecognized states and their citizens, the commentary urges a return to the problem of sovereignty that takes seriously the desires that sovereignty evokes. Doing so, it argues, can help us understand the shape that political belonging might take beyond the nation-state.

In Thailand, the volatile period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by changing material and political atmospheres. Air pollution, the COVID-19 pandemic, and government restrictions on speech transformed how Thai citizens breathed and how they related to the monarchy. Understanding this period as a history of breath reconceptualizes the citizen-body as volumetric, recasting politics as an intermaterial practice. Breath, its vibrations, and its constraints, as it moves across the topologies of the respiratory system, generate densely material, richly symbolic political relations that bind citizens to one another, to the polity, and to the world. Small particles, dust, viruses, speech restrictions, and tear gas constrained the breath of Thai citizens while shaping the conditions in which dissenting vibrations could shake the country's cosmologies. Attention to the citizen-body as volumetric thus recasts the lungs as relational chambers of political capacity, resituating political analysis within the material world and suggesting that all politics are, in some sense, environmental.

This commentary explores the politics of refusal as it plays out in struggles for citizenship. Refusals of noncitizenship involve a dialectic of negation and affirmation. They are at once acts of protest against an injustice or wrong, while also generative of new forms of political subjectivity and community. The refusals of noncitizenship found in the articles of this special forum involve acts of world building that involve new rights, responsibilities, and communities in the making.

This commentary on the set of articles for the “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum considers ways that relationships between states and residents are being reconfigured in the wake of environmental, technological, and economic changes. It also questions the concept of liberal citizenship as a framework for understanding contemporary political subjectivity.

In northeast Houston, a community organization is experimenting with building green infrastructure, beginning with rain gardens. In doing so, the project's participants are engaging in what might be called “infrastructural citizenship.” This form of citizenship uses “civil power” to defy white-supremacist legacies of technopolitical flood control, which have made northeast Houston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city. Yet infrastructural citizenship also expresses commitments beyond stormwater management, taking aim at inherited infrastructural logics and traditions associated with other norms of US petroculture (e.g., spatialized and racialized environmental toxicity, translocal supply chains). In contrast to the default petrosolidarity that ensnares the Global North (and much of the Global South), initiatives like the rain garden project evince a growing geosolidarity with the land and its capacities. Such a politics can challenge both a racist petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency that it perpetrates.